Air Conditioning and Air-to-Air Heat Pumps for Church Halls
Your boiler will fail eventually, and since 2022 the rules about what is allowed to replace it have changed. A church hall used several times a week is one of the few buildings where an air-to-air heat pump is clearly the right answer, and the same equipment cools the room in summer. This page sets out what the rules actually say, what suits a hall, and what permission you will need.
Free site survey • F-Gas registered engineers • East Midlands, Lincolnshire & Yorkshire
What actually changed, and what it means for your hall
This gets described as an Act of Parliament and it is nothing of the kind. There is no legislation. It is Church of England internal law, which is exactly why so few heating companies describe it correctly.
It did not ban the boiler. It moved it to the back of the queue.
Before July 2022 a failed boiler was replaced with a boiler and nobody asked a question. Since the Faculty Rules changed, your DAC and your Chancellor have to have due regard to the Church’s net zero guidance when they decide, and that reverses which option is the easy one.
A heat pump or far infrared now takes the short route. A like-for-like gas or oil boiler takes the long one, because you have to make a formal case for why the low-carbon options were considered and ruled out. Neither route is closed. One of them takes months you do not have when the hall is cold.
| What changed | What it means for your hall |
|---|---|
| Net zero carbon by 2030 | Set by General Synod in February 2020, covering the whole Church estate including halls. It is policy rather than law, but it is the policy your DAC and Chancellor are working to, so it decides what gets approved. |
| The Faculty Rules changed on 1 July 2022 | The Faculty Jurisdiction (Amendment) Rules 2022 require the DAC and the Chancellor to have due regard to the Church’s net zero guidance. In practice a gas or oil boiler now needs a faculty, and then only where non-fossil options have been fully considered and ruled out. |
| It is not a ban. It is a harder road. | Nobody will stop you applying for another gas boiler. You will have to make a formal case for why you are not doing the low-carbon thing, which takes time you usually do not have when a boiler has just died in November. |
| No new oil boilers in churches after the end of 2025 | Subject to a caveat about connecting rural communities to the grid. If your hall runs on oil, this is the one to plan for rather than react to. |
| Heat pumps and far infrared | These are the only two replacements the Church’s routemap names for fossil heating at the end of its life. Which of the two suits you depends almost entirely on how often the hall is used. |
| Action plans by 2027 | The highest-emitting 20% of churches in each diocese need a Net Zero Carbon Action Plan finalised by 2027, covering how fossil heating gets replaced. |
Two honest caveats. The Church’s own revised routemap now accepts that the 2030 target will not be met, forecasting roughly a 29% reduction; the target has not been dropped and none of the boiler rules have changed. And enforcement varies a great deal between dioceses. Speak to your DAC early rather than assuming your diocese will take a hard line, or a soft one.
A hall that sits cold between sessions does not want a system designed to hold a building at temperature all week.
Why a hall is a different problem from a church
A hall is not a church, and it is not a house
Most low-carbon heating advice assumes a building that is warm all the time. A wet air source heat pump is happiest running continuously at a low flow temperature, gently holding a building at temperature. That is the opposite of a church hall, which sits cold and empty for days and then needs to be comfortable by seven o’clock on a Tuesday for a room full of people.
An air-to-air heat pump puts warm air into the room within minutes of being switched on, because it heats air directly rather than heating water that then has to heat a radiator that then has to heat the room. For a building used in bursts, that difference is the whole argument.
The same equipment cools the hall in summer
An air-to-air heat pump is air conditioning that runs in both directions. In December it heats. In July it cools. A wet heat pump and a gas boiler can only ever do one of those.
For a hall that earns its keep from lettings, that matters more than it sounds. Parties, holiday clubs, exercise classes, polling stations and wedding receptions all happen in summer, and a hall that is bearable in a July heatwave is a hall that gets booked.
Which heating suits which building
How often the space is used matters more than its size, its age or how well it is insulated. Get that wrong and no amount of equipment will fix it. This is the same logic diocesan guidance uses.
How often is the room actually used?
Not how big it is, not how old it is, and not how well it is insulated. Those all matter to the sizing. None of them decides the technology. What decides the technology is whether the room is warm all week, warm in bursts, or cold until somebody arrives.
Draw a week out and the answer usually picks itself. An hour on a Sunday and you are heating people, not a building. Three or four evenings and a Saturday morning and you want heat that arrives in minutes. In use most of the day, most days, and a wet system becomes worth costing.
| How the space is used | What suits it |
|---|---|
| A nave used for an hour or two on a Sunday | Heat the people, not the building. Under-pew heating or far infrared panels. Warming thousands of cubic metres of cold stone for a one-hour service is an expensive way to be uncomfortable, whatever the heat source. |
| A hall used several times a week, in sessions | Air-to-air heat pump. Diocesan guidance describes this as intermittent weekly use, and says an air-to-air heat pump will work in uninsulated and large buildings, unlike a wet system, so long as it is sized correctly. |
| A space in use most of the day, most days | A wet air source heat pump becomes worth considering, if the building fabric and the existing pipework will support running at a low flow temperature. Offices, nurseries and community hubs inside church buildings can fall here. |
| A toilet, vestry, store or kitchenette | Far infrared panel. Too small to justify its own indoor unit and its share of an outdoor one. A slim panel on the wall or ceiling warms the people and surfaces in front of it, with nothing outside and no refrigerant. |
| A hall that is barely used at all | Possibly nothing. If it runs a couple of hours a month, portable or radiant heating may genuinely be the right answer and we will tell you so. Spending twenty thousand pounds to heat a room nobody is in is not a carbon saving. |
None of this is a substitute for a heat loss calculation and a proper look at how the building is used. It is the shape of the decision, not the decision.
Permission: the part that catches people out
A church building is not an ordinary commercial property. Getting the equipment right is the easy half. This is the order things need to happen in, and the reason to start a year before the boiler dies rather than the week after.
The Diocesan Advisory Committee advises on what will and will not be approved, and they would far rather be asked early than handed a finished scheme. A conversation at this stage costs nothing and can save an entire application.
Installing an air-to-air heat pump in a church building requires a faculty. That means drawings, a specification, a statement of need and a statement of significance. The technical half of that is what we supply.
The external units need planning permission. This is a separate process from the faculty, runs on its own timetable, and is where schemes most often stall.
Most church halls are not listed even where the church is, but plenty are, and a hall inside a curtilage can be caught. Worth establishing on day one rather than month four.
In a conservation area, or on an elevation that matters, a condenser on the wall may simply be refused. There are systems that work with no outdoor unit at all, venting through two small cores instead, and we fit those as well. It is one option among several, not the answer to everything, but it is the answer when nothing can go on the outside of the building.
What we do
Design, installation, commissioning and maintenance. The faculty is led by you and your architect; we provide the technical case that goes inside it.
A free survey, as its own visit
Room by room, with a heat loss calculation and a proper look at how and when the hall is actually used. It is free and it is always a separate visit, never bolted onto something else.
Sizing for intermittent use, not continuous
A hall that needs to come up to temperature from cold in under an hour is sized differently from a building held at temperature all week. Getting this wrong is the commonest reason a heat pump disappoints.
Siting that a DAC will accept
Where the indoor units go so they are not the first thing you see, where the outdoor unit goes so it is neither visible nor audible from the wrong places, and what to do when there is nowhere acceptable for one.
Drawings and data for the faculty application
Equipment specifications, sound data, dimensions, proposed positions and the efficiency figures, in a form your architect can put straight into the application.
Installation and commissioning by F-Gas registered engineers
With the commissioning record, refrigerant charge and equipment documentation handed over in one folder for your files.
Maintenance afterwards
Halls run hard and get neglected. Planned maintenance keeps efficiency up and keeps your refrigerant records straight. Commercial PPM contracts →
What a church building changes about the installation
The equipment is ordinary equipment. What differs is everything around it, and that is the part that decides whether the job still looks right and still works in fifteen years.
The outdoor unit gets a cage, and the pipework runs in metal
Churches lose metal. A condenser standing at the back of a hall, out of sight of the road, is about as soft a target as there is, and the loss is never just the unit. It is the refrigerant charge, the pipework, the brickwork, the making good, and the weeks with no heating while it is all put back. We cage outdoor units on church sites: steel, bolted down, padlocked. It does not make a unit theft-proof. It makes it a poor target, which in practice is what stops it happening.
External pipework goes in metal trunking rather than plastic. Plastic chalks and goes brittle in sunlight, discolours against stone, and splits where something knocks it. Metal holds its finish, takes a knock, can be powder coated to suit the elevation, and is a great deal more trouble to cut through to get at the pipes inside. It costs more up front and it is the cheaper of the two on a building nobody intends to redo.
Toilets, vestries and small rooms get infrared instead
There is a size below which an indoor unit is simply the wrong tool. A toilet, a vestry, a store or a kitchenette does not need its own indoor unit, and giving it one costs you capacity you would rather have in the hall.
Far infrared panels suit those rooms. Slim, silent, nothing outside, no refrigerant, mounted on a wall or a ceiling, and they warm the people and surfaces in front of them rather than trying to heat the air in a room whose door is open half the time. Far infrared is one of the two replacements the Church’s own routemap names for fossil heating, so it is not a compromise in faculty terms either.
The diocese that decides your scheme is the one on our doorstep
Southwell Minster is the cathedral of the Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham, which covers the whole county. Our Group Managing Director lives in the town.
What that is worth, and what it is not
The Diocesan Advisory Committee that will look at your proposals sits there too. Worship on that site goes back well over nine hundred years, though the Minster has only been a cathedral since the eighteen eighties, and the diocese takes in one parish in South Yorkshire as well as the county.
For a Nottinghamshire church that matters in a small, practical way. Every parish in the diocese is inside the area we already work in, so nobody is driving down from the other end of the country to look at your boiler, and the guidance your DAC works to is not something we had to go and read up on for this page.
More than 200
parishes in the diocese, and over 300 worshipping communities across them
73
church schools and academies in the diocese, with around 20,000 pupils between them
Its own plan
the diocese publishes a Net Zero Carbon Action Plan and its own net zero guidance for church buildings
Four things we would rather you heard from us
Before you spend the money, and before you spend six months on an application.
Outdoor units are visible and they make noise
There is no version of this where the equipment is invisible. A condenser is roughly the size of a large suitcase, it has a fan in it, and it has to go somewhere with airflow. On a sensitive elevation that is a real planning problem, and pretending otherwise wastes everybody’s time. The cage we put round it adds to that: it is one more object against the wall, and it does not make the corner of the building any prettier. We would still rather fit one and say so.
A cold stone nave is a different job entirely
Everything on this page is about halls and meeting rooms. Heating the church itself is a harder, more specialised problem with different answers, and anyone who tells you the same kit solves both has not looked at your building.
Electricity costs more per unit than gas
A heat pump wins because it delivers four or five units of heat per unit of electricity, not because electricity is cheap. In a hall used in short bursts the sums are usually good, but they are sums, and we would rather do them with you before you commit than defend them afterwards.
We are not your faculty adviser
The application is led by you, your PCC and your architect, with the DAC advising. We supply the equipment, the technical case and the installation. We will not tell you a faculty is a formality, because it is not.
Common questions
Can we still put a gas boiler in our church hall?+
In principle yes, but it now requires a faculty and you have to show that non-fossil options were fully considered and ruled out. Since the Faculty Jurisdiction (Amendment) Rules 2022 came into force in July 2022, the DAC and the Chancellor must have due regard to the Church of England’s net zero guidance when they decide. It is not a ban, but it is deliberately the harder road, and it is slow at exactly the moment you need heat.
What is an air-to-air heat pump?+
Air conditioning that runs in both directions. It takes heat out of the outside air and moves it inside through one or more indoor units, and in summer it does the same in reverse to cool the room. Diocesan guidance puts it at around four to five units of heat for every unit of electricity used.
Will an air-to-air heat pump actually heat a cold hall in time?+
That is its main advantage over a wet system. It heats the air in the room directly rather than heating water, so warm air arrives within minutes rather than after an hour or two of warming up radiators. For a hall that sits cold between sessions, it is the right shape of technology.
Do we need a faculty for air conditioning in a church hall?+
Yes. Installing an air-to-air heat pump in a church building requires a faculty, and the external units also require planning permission, which is a separate application on its own timetable. If the building is listed you will need listed building consent as well. Start the conversation with your DAC before you choose equipment.
Our hall is in a conservation area and we cannot put a unit on the wall. Is there an option?+
Yes. There are systems with no outdoor unit at all, where the whole system sits inside and vents through two small cores in the wall, roughly the diameter of a drinks can. They have limits on the size of space one unit will serve, so they are one option rather than the answer to everything, but where nothing can be fixed to the outside of the building they are often the only route.
Does it cool the hall as well as heat it?+
Yes, from the same equipment and the same installation. That is a genuine difference from a wet heat pump or a gas boiler, both of which can only heat. For halls that take bookings through the summer it is often the thing that pays for the system.
Church halls get broken into. Will the outdoor unit be stolen?+
It is a real risk, and it is why we cage them. The cage is steel, bolted down and padlocked, and it turns a two minute job into a noisy one that needs tools. External pipework goes in metal trunking rather than plastic for the same reason, because plastic can be cut through in seconds to get at the pipes. Neither makes a unit theft-proof. Both make it a poor enough target that thieves go elsewhere.
The toilets and the vestry are far too small for air conditioning. What happens to them?+
They are, and we would not put an indoor unit in them. Far infrared panels suit small rooms: slim, silent, nothing outside, no refrigerant, and mounted on a wall or a ceiling. They warm the people and surfaces in front of them rather than heating the air, which is the right behaviour in a room whose door keeps opening. Far infrared is named alongside heat pumps in the Church’s routemap, so it sits comfortably in the same faculty application as the hall.
Is our church hall covered by TM44 inspections?+
It can be. Where one person controls more than 12kW of air conditioning in a building, the whole installation falls in scope for a statutory inspection every five years, and the outputs of several smaller units are added together. A hall with a few units can cross that line without anyone noticing. More on TM44 →
Does the 2030 target still stand?+
The target has not been withdrawn, but the Church’s own revised routemap now accepts it will not be met and forecasts roughly a 29% reduction instead. None of the rules about replacing fossil boilers have changed as a result. What does vary is how strictly individual dioceses apply them, so your own DAC is the authority on what will be approved in your case.
Start with the survey
It is free, it is a visit of its own, and you get a heat loss calculation, a sizing proposal and the equipment data your architect needs for the faculty. Whether you then use us is a separate question.