Hammonds Plains church using solar tech to heat, generate electricity

A church in a Halifax suburb has seen the light with green technology.

The Cornerstone Wesleyan Church in Hammonds Plains believes it's the first church east of Ontario to be powered with solar technology and heat pumps, and feed energy back into the power grid.

"We knew that energy was going to continue to increase in cost and solar was going to continue to be free. Nobody was going to charge us for the sunshine," said Denn Guptill, the lead pastor at the church.

The church is an 8,000-square-foot building that was built on a slab a decade ago. In-floor heating, powered by a hot water boiler, has always made for expensive power bills.

Now, two heat pumps have been installed and 44 solar panels line the roof.

"We started to investigate different options and finally settled on a twin approach," said Guptill. "We are using heat pumps to reduce our energy costs and solar panels to produce energy."

The total cost of the project was about $80,000, with the money borrowed from the Wesleyan Church denomination.

Guptill estimates the heat pumps will save about $5,000 a year, and the solar panels will save up to $2,500 a year. The system should be paid off in about a decade, Guptill said, with any extra energy produced being sold to Nova Scotia Power.

"Over the next few years we'd pay the same amount of money whether it was to Nova Scotia Power for the energy we'd use, or the capital cost to produce energy and save energy," he said.

Guptill can monitor the system with his cellphone.

Even on cloudy days the solar panels produce power, although not as much as they do when the weather is good.

"Last week when we had those gorgeous four or five days in a row, we were producing a lot more power than we were using in the building," said Guptill. "Through a net metering agreement with Nova Scotia Power, that was being sold back to them to be used on the grid by other consumers."

Guptill says he's had conversations with other church administrators and hopes they will try to make their facilities more energy efficient.