Client: St Michael’s Church, Chart Sutton, Kent
Project: Heated pew cushions installed, plus ongoing church electrical works
Installer: Lake Electrical Limited
We have worked with St Michael’s Church, Chart Sutton for several years, handling electrical upgrades and ongoing maintenance. After completing a full rewire and LED lighting upgrade there in 2019, we were asked back to fit heated pew cushions and make the church more comfortable through the colder months.
Why churches are so difficult to heat
A church is a big volume of air with a high ceiling, used intensively for a few hours a week and barely at all the rest of the time. Heat the air in a building like that, and most of it ends up somewhere near the roof, long after everyone has gone home.
Conventional heating is slow to respond and expensive to run in those conditions. Warming the whole building for a Sunday service means paying to heat a lot of air nobody is sitting in.
St Michael’s needed something that would:
- Put the warmth where the congregation actually feels it
- Avoid any fixing into or alteration of the historic pews
- Stay visually unobtrusive in a listed interior
- Be controllable for different services and different-sized congregations
How heated pew cushions work
They work the same way a heated car seat does. You switch them on shortly before people arrive, and they warm the person rather than the building.
Because the heat goes straight to where it is needed, the running cost is lower than warming the whole interior, and the response is close to immediate rather than a two-hour warm-up. The cushions sit on the pews rather than being fixed into them, so nothing is drilled, altered or permanently changed.
They can also be used selectively. If forty people turn up rather than two hundred, you heat the seating being used and leave the rest off.
Installing heated pew cushions in a working church
At St Michael’s, the cushions were installed with the layout, the power supply and the controls worked out first, so the system tied into the existing electrical installation rather than sitting awkwardly alongside it.
The church stayed in use throughout. The work was planned around services and events, and at the end of the job the church was left safe, tidy and fully usable, with everything tested. Where something needed adjusting as we went, it was discussed with the church rather than decided for them.
The PCC has asked me to express our thanks for the work your firm carried out on our church. We are delighted with the results and found you and your staff friendly, co-operative and professional throughout the project. Your understanding of the needs of an operational church and the way the work was adapted to fit the building was very much appreciated.
Parochial Church Council, St Michael’s Church, Chart Sutton
A long-standing relationship with the church
The heated pew cushions are the latest project in our ongoing work with the church. The full rewire and lighting upgrade in 2019 gave the building an installation that could be built on, and we have looked after the electrics there since.
That history is most of the reason this job went smoothly. We already knew the building, the supply and the way the church is used, so we could plan the installation using our existing knowledge of the building.
Talk to us about heating your church
We fit electric heating for churches and houses of worship across Kent and the wider South East, including heated pew cushions and radiant heating for halls. If your building is expensive to warm and slow to respond, we can come and look at what would work, and tell you honestly if it would not.
Request a quote, or call the team on 01732 758 985.
Lake Electrical Limited, commercial electrical contractors since 2008, working across Kent, East Sussex, Surrey and the wider South East.
