Heat pumps that help you earn your Green Flag
Schools use significant energy every day on lighting, appliances and water heating. An Orca heat pump cuts that bill by up to 70% — and gives your Green-Schools committee a genuine, measurable action to point to.
What is the Green Flag programme?
Green-Schools, also known internationally as Eco-Schools, is an environmental education programme co-founded by the Foundation for Environmental Education. It now runs in more than 50 countries and involves over 40,000 schools worldwide, each working towards the same goal: reducing their environmental impact and building that thinking into everyday school life.
In Ireland, schools work towards the award through seven defined steps. Reducing energy use — including the energy spent heating water — is one of the clearest, most measurable ways to make progress against them.
The seven steps to a Green Flag
- Form a Green-Schools committee — students, teachers, the principal, caretakers and support staff, parents, and interested members of the wider community.
- Carry out an environmental review, looking at energy use from lighting and water heating through to waste sent to landfill.
- Set an action plan with clear targets — for example, reducing energy consumption by a set percentage by switching to a more efficient heating system.
- Monitor and evaluate progress against the action plan as the project continues.
- Build the work into the curriculum, linking it to science and other subjects.
- Inform and involve the wider school community, through noticeboards, newsletters and events.
- Agree a Green Code — a short statement of the school's commitment to stay environmentally friendly.
Where Sweeney Renewables fits in
An Orca heat pump is exactly the kind of concrete measure an action plan target calls for at step three — it's specific, it's measurable, and the savings are easy to report back to the committee and the wider school. It also lowers your school's carbon footprint while providing hot water for sanitary and drinking purposes all year round.
The Orca heat pump is a Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) approved product, designed to give a typical payback within three years on the cost of heating water in a school. We have agents and plumbers located throughout Ireland who can install a heating system in your school.
What you get
- Hot water supply all year round
- Energy savings of up to 70%
- 12-year guarantee
- Clean water supply
- SEAI-approved heating system