Our Green Journey
We have always cared deeply about our environment. After all, we know that lots of our guests come here to enjoy our beautiful countryside and rivers. As guardians of 20 miles of rivers, we take our responsibility seriously.
Since 2009 we have been working on making our hotel as green as possible. This hasn't been easy in a 300 year old building!
We have made huge strides though and done lots of things some small, such as fitting low energy light bulbs, and some large, like building an Eco Energy Centre to heat the hotel. Collectively though these have all reduced our fossil fuel consumption on site by 50%.
Our new Eco Energy Centre was commissioned in February 2013 and now provides all of the heat and hot water for the hotel.
For the technically minded, it contains a Hargassner 198 KW biomass boiler burning wood pellets. There is a store containing approximately 24 Tonnes of pellets.
On the roof is a 4 KW photovoltaic array generating electricity.
The wood pellets come from fast growing trees sustainably harvested in southern England.
| CO2 Saved | 81 Tonnes |
| Heat generated | 132 MW Hours |
| Electricity | 956 KW Hours |
In May 2013 we won the prestiguous PEA Business Award for Tourism. This national competition recognises those people and organisations who have made an outstanding contribution to their business environment.
We were delighted to win the Devon Environmental Business Initiative award or "DEBI" in 2012. This reflects so well on the whole team and what their collective efforts have acheived.
These awards recognise the practical measures that we have taken over recent years:
We reduced heating energy consumption by 10% by:
· Upgrading loft insulation
· Lowering the hot water and radiator temperatures
· Fitting new boiler controls
We reduced water bills by:
· Investing £18,000 in a borehole and pumps.
· Bottled water replaced with bottles refilled in house using a water filtration and carbonization system – saving 12,000 glass bottles from landfill
· Fitting economisers to 40 x WC cisterns
We reduced electricity usage by 11% even with higher hotel bedroom occupancy by:
· Installed a £9,000 voltage optimisation system
· Replaced 125 traditional bulbs with low energy bulbs
We reduced landfill and chemical usage by 60% and saved £7,500 through:
· Using a waste compactor to recycle all plastic and cardboard . This reduced our 1100L skips going to landfill from 6 to 2 a week
· Installing a new chemical dosing system throughout the hotel and retrained the staff. This reduced chemical use by 65%
We reinforced our local connections with local suppliers
· 95% of food is fresh and seasonal - majority from local suppliers
· The menus in all 3 restaurants are seasonal and changed daily
· Local suppliers are celebrated in our menus
· We restored our old kitchen garden and now grow our own fruit and vegetables. The vegetable gardener is listed on our menus alongside our other suppliers.
Our hotel and pub remain at the heart of our village village community
We subsidise a weekly lunch for Help the Aged and meeting rooms for WI and local history society. We sponsor our village cricket, rugby and football teams.
