Recently we achieved our second Green Flag for the work we have carried out on Energy Awareness. This award recognises the hard work carried out by the Green Flag Committee over the past two years. We collected our Green Flag at an official ceremony held in the Lifetime Lab, Cork on the 27th February (see picture below).

Our second Green Flag was officially raised by Quentin Gargan (see picture above) on 12 June and we invited the whole community in to celebrate with us.

The Changes we made

The biggest and simplest change we made was to change the meter for the boiler to a digital clock which now allows us to turn on the heating for an hour instead of two hours, the smallest time setting on the old timer.  This immediately cuts down on half the amount of oil used daily.

The school has also changed to Green Electricity (supplied by Energia).

Two committee members monitor the units of electricity / litres of oil used weekly and these results are displayed for all to see in the gym. We can see clearly which changes help us to save electricity and which don’t.

Close doors when leaving any room in the school. Turn off the lights when leaving any room in the school and when it is bright enough in the classroom. Computers turned on when needed instead of turning them on every morning at 9am. Computers put on standby when finished working on them instead of leaving them turned on.

Two boys go around the school at the end of both breaks and home time to make sure all lights that should be off are turned off. We invited in local Green Party representative, Quentin Gargan, to help us survey/audit our school at the start of our project and again to see what progress we had made. We also invited in Bob Murnane and Michael Brosnan (Culamán Windfarm) to talk to us about windmills and how much electricity we produce.

The West Lodge Hotel, Bantry, also carried out an energy saving project recently so we invited them in to discuss the changes they had made with us and then we visited them at the hotel to see these changes in use. We also got our school surveyed using a thermal imaging camera.

We held an Energy Day of Action where all pupils, parents, Dr. Mary Stack (Cork environmental officer), Teddy Browne (West Cork environmental officer), Mr. Quentin Gargan (local Green Party representative), representatives from the parents association and even Nicholas Murphy (Cork footballer) attended.