Doug Selby, owner of Meadowlark Builders, in Ann Arbor, Mich., thinks certification is worth the time and effort. “It’s a little pricey, but we felt like we got good value with it,” he says, adding that the training is “a full immersion; by the time they’re done with it, they really know what’s going on.” Within his company, Selby touts certification as an incentive. “We use that as a carrot to move our guys up the ladder once they go through that whole course,” he says. Certification is also a requirement by the Michigan Saves program that encourages homeowners to get a piece of the Recovery Act pie by implementing energy-efficient upgrades. Since Meadowlark Builders has significantly increased its business doing these retrofits, certification was really a no-brainer as far as Selby was concerned. “I’m glad to see it’s become mandatory,” he says. “It’s just too easy for someone to claim this or that with no accountability. Personally, I think it’s the right thing to do, and we highlight it to differentiate ourselves from the competition.”
Tom Weiher, president of Carmel Builders, in Milwaukee, thinks certification is very important and is vital to the success of an energy-efficient retrofit. Yet nobody on the company’s staff is certified; Carmel Builders partners with experts who are. The home energy consultant that it partners with — Tom Krawczyk of TJH Energy Consulting — is certified by both BPI and RESNET, and Carmel Builders’ employees have been trained by him and by Focus on Energy, Wisconsin’s utility-sponsored incentive program. Wisconsin Home Improvement Co., Carmel Builders’ insulation contractor, is also BPI-certified.
These partnerships have allowed Carmel Builders to pick up business where these credentials are required while saving the company the certification and training costs. “Rather than train my lead carpenters to be good insulators, I prefer working with a certified trade contractor,” Weiher says. “We worked with them on conventional remodeling projects for several years and developed a good relationship. Since they were certified and fully trained, we brought them along for projects that required insulation and air sealing. We just found it easier to use the resources we have to expand our income.”
TREND OR FAD? According to Zarker, there are currently about 16,000 BPI-certified professionals; in 2005 that number was a paltry 350. In 2010 alone, BPI certified 11,000 individuals, no doubt due in part to the promise of Home Star. RESNET has certified more than 4,000 raters and home energy auditors, according to Baden.
“The largest primary use of energy in the U.S. is by existing homes, and we’re not going to be able to achieve energy policy or environmental goals until we find a way to improve the performance of existing homes,” Baden says. “I see a lot of growing activity on the local and state levels and among utilities to encourage homeowners to make comprehensive improvements to their homes. This is a trend that will go on irrespective of what happened to Home Star.”
To that end, both BPI and RESNET are making sure that standards and certifications are not simply a passing fad. RESNET is working with Congress to create a federal tax credit for consumers who improve home energy efficiency; BPI has developed a home auditing standard, which it hopes will be certified by the American National Standards Institute. The possibility of BPI’s standard notwithstanding, Zarker feels that the DOE and other governing bodies will start pushing more aggressively for these types of certifications to be more common in the marketplace. He says, “Back when Vice President Biden announced the Recovery Through Retrofit program [in November 2010], he said that as a homeowner he looked in the Yellow Pages like everyone else and he didn’t know who to trust. He needed a differentiator. Certification is that differentiator.” —Mark A. Newman is a senior editor for REMODELING, sister publication of REPLACEMENT CONTRACTOR.
A FEDERAL MANDATE FOR CERTIFICATION? According to BPI’s Larry Zarker, another key reason why certification is a valuable tool in a contractor’s arsenal is because the Department of Energy (DOE) has gotten behind a set of standard work specifications in order to have a recognized national credential to perform weatherization tasks.
The Workforce Guidelines for Home Energy Upgrades were developed as part of the DOE’s Weatherization Assistance Program, which mandated that, to be considered for Recovery Act dollars, some or all of the contractors performing the retrofits needed to meet certain standards.
The guidelines, voluntary for the time being, are intended to establish a baseline for quality across the industry, according to Benjamin Goldstein, the DOE’s project lead. “Down the line there are a number of DOE or other federal programs that may consider requiring a certified workforce; performing work in accordance with the Standard Work Specifications could become the prerequisite for receiving public funds. Of course we are still only in the beginning stages of that conversation within the industry,” he says, adding that in the home performance realm it would likely be utilities or other state-run programs that would adopt these guidelines.
Goldstein feels that the Standard Work Specifications, in particular, are a means to get construction industry professionals onboard with a standardized approach to weatherization and home performance. “The majority of consumer spending is going to be in the remodeling and replacement industry for decades to come,” Goldstein says. “We’re really trying to provide the tools for savvy remodeler/replacement contractors to bundle efficiency upgrades with traditional remodeling activities to capture energy savings and the significant upsell opportunity.”