Energy auditing a career straight from college?
by Chad
Is energy auditing something towards a real green career or just a Mickey Mouse job until you can get something more substantial? If I'm going to spend some money on training in energy auditing should I go with a course like yours or RESNET or BPI? Thanks for any advice! -- Dear Chad, Thanks for the questions. I will answer them in order below: 1) "Energy Auditing sounds easy, but is it really?" Absolutely. For too long, people have equated energy savings with engineering degrees, complex investigation and expensive tools. That is not the case. Energy auditing is as easy or as complex as you want it to be. There are dozens and dozens of opportunities for energy savings throughout a typical home and two to three times that in commercial businesses. Even if you just focus on a few of those areas of savings, you can generate significant savings for the home or business owner. We just completed a home energy audit that revealed about $1,200 a year in potential savings (and that was without a blower door, without expensive retrofits and without thousands of dollars in upgrade costs). Of course, the audit could have been more complex and we probably would have found have found additional savings. But, we believe that for the customer there is a point of diminishing returns, where it takes more and more effort to get those last few percentages of savings. Our program is focused on training you the essentials so you can generate 80% of the savings with 20% of the effort and tools. And our program is simple enough that you do not need a degree in engineering or mathematics, you just need a strong desire to help people save energy. 2) "Is energy auditing something towards a real green career or just a Mickey Mouse job until you can get something more substantial?" Energy auditing is most definitely a "real career." It has been a career for the last 30+ years (the 70’s oil embargo was the first real starting point for energy auditing as a career). Additionally, there is not a "green career" today that deals with energy that does rely upon energy auditing as a critical component. For example, you may want to put a 2kW solar system on your home, but in order for that system to run efficiently and to cover as much of your actual energy use as possible, you will need to perform an energy audit to identify and eliminate wasted energy. Otherwise, you are wasting money either by having to purchase excess panels that you don’t actually need, or worse yet still paying the power company for excess power use that you could easily eliminate. It doesn’t get more substantial than saving energy and saving money. 3) "If I'm going to spend some money on training in energy auditing should I go with a course like yours or RESNET or BPI?" It all depends on what you are wanting in terms of your career and your training. If you want to do Commercial Energy Audits, Denby Energy is the only one with a Commercial Energy Auditor Training. RESNET and BPI focus on home audits only. For the home side, RESNET and BPI training takes longer to complete and costs 2-3 times what Denby Energy Training costs. RESNET and BPI are tech-based training, which focuses on using technical tools to complete home energy evaluations. There is nothing wrong with this approach and it has a place in the energy auditing world. But when you consider that it costs $10,000-$20,000 or more to acquire all these tools, that means you must charge your clients more just to cover your costs and price point is a major issue for most homeowners. As we showed in the home mentioned above, we can get about 80% of the savings with 20% of the tools and effort. That audit took about 1 hour on the ground. Also, we have a number of RESNET raters that completed our training program as well to round-out their offerings so they can provide the energy audit essentials that Denby Energy teaches and then bring the "tech" side to bear if they need to expand the scope of the audit. We’ve also had a number of RESNET trainers request the right to teach our courses as well because they feel adding our courses will provides full market potential for them covering essential auditing (Denby Energy ) as well as the tech side of auditing. Many people have found Denby Energy to be a strong, cost effective way for them to start and build their energy auditing career. No matter what direction you choose for yourself, you can be assured that a career in energy auditing is a great way to help people, protect the environment, and make money. We invite you to read the testimonials on our site about what people have to say about our training programs. Best of luck in your future endeavors and of course if you have any additional questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Editor's note. For Denby Energy accreditation information go here Denby Energy accreditation information go here Cheers, Michael Denby Denby Energy Team Home Energy Audit Training Click here to read or post comments. |
