Geothermal
“Will you strive to safeguard the integrity of God’s creation, and respect, sustain and renew the life of the Earth?”
“I will, with God’s help.”
- The Baptismal Covenant, Book of Alternative Services, p. 159
Stewardship of the environment is a core value at All Saints’. Many members have made significant changes in their individual lives and behaviour to live in better relationship with our Earth, and we support each other in those endeavours. As a community, we prioritize actions such as using reuseable, rather than disposable, plates at church dinners, composting food scraps, and encouraging bicycling. In 2024, we installed a bike rack attached to the sign near Lakeshore Drive, and held our second annual Blessing of the Bikes! We are also located near several bus lines for those who wish to use public transit.
We take seriously our responsibility as an accessible public green space in the neighbourhood, and we do our best to maintain our gardens as a neat and attractive feature of the streetscape. We welcome walkers, dogs, and other visitors!
In the past we have also engaged in some very small-scale vegetable gardening in cooperation with the children and educators of CPE Dorval.
One of our proudest moments as a parish was the installation of our geothermal heating and cooling system, described below – which now, more than 15 years later, when the province of Quebec is offering major incentives to install similar systems, serves as proof that these investments pay off over the long term!
In 2007, the parish (then St. Andrew & St. Mark) began the installation of a geothermal heating system that replaced three oil-burning furnaces, ending our winter pollution of the environment. Additional benefits are that it saves us on heating costs and provides us with air conditioning in the summer, since the geothermal heating process can be reversed. After hiring a consulting engineering firm to assess the heat loss from our buildings, eight wells were drilled, each about 500 feet deep.
Drilling was begun in March 2007 – five wells under the parking lot on the west side of the church, and three more outside the chapel on the east side. The construction crew then fed loops of polyethylene pipe into the wells, to carry fluid – a mixture of water and nontoxic antifreeze – down into the well and back up again. While underground the fluid absorbs heat from the relatively constant temperature of the earth below the frost line, and this heat is extracted when the fluid is circulated through heat pumps inside the building. After the wells were capped and sealed the tubing was fed into the church basement furnace rooms below ground, so when the job was completed nothing was visible outside.
Sunday, March 25, 2007, was Launch Day at the church. Dr. Andreas Athienitis, a solar engineer from Concordia University, spoke to us about alternative energy sources. He said we were using a form of solar energy (since the earth energy we were tapping into came originally from the sun). At the end of the service the congregation went out into the muddy parking lot, where then rector Karen Egan blessed the wells (see below).
