When a person gets their home weatherized, that house is more comfortable.
It's more safe and more healthy and it eventually saves them money on their energy bills.
It becomes more livable, more affordable, and hopefully makes for a happier family.
The Weatherization Assistance Program is the nation's oldest and largest whole house home
performance program.
I work with low-income families and we're in every state, territory in the country.
The National Weatherization Assistance Program serves a very important function in our country
to make sure that all individuals can live in a home that is healthy, safe, durable,
and comfortable.
It can be a very big change in their life.
Right?
It means they have more money in their pockets to pay for food, to pay for medicine, to send
their kids to college.
Right?
It makes a big difference.
A lot of them that I get to talk to are just thrilled that this has happened.
They didn't know it was possible that they could get all these things done to their house
for free.
The Guidelines for Home Energy Professionals project is about providing a foundation for
the weatherization program as well as the home performance industry and giving a baseline
of work quality expectations and work performance expectations that the entire district can
build off of.
So the first step of the Guidelines for Home Energy Professionals project was to define
quality work through standard work specifications that take a whole house approach to energy
efficiency installations.
After defining quality work, the next thing was to define quality training so we could
make sure that workers were learning what they needed to know in order to be effective
in the field.
The final step of the guidelines project was to define quality workers and we did this
through advanced home energy professional certifications that demonstrate that workers
have the knowledge, the experience, and the competency in the field in order to do quality
home performance work.
Prior to the guidelines project, the weatherization program and the home performance program,
sort of as a whole, didn't have a consistent way to measure the work that we did or the
professionalism of the folks who were working in it.
Every state has different standards.
Each training center has a different way of training to those standards.
I think for us as an industry to grow we needed a consistent standard across the nation that
we can all teach to, just getting everybody kind of on the same page, increasing the quality,
the efficiency of everything.
I think this is the time now that we're finally doing it.
We're finally, kind of, coming together.
It's not every man for himself anymore.
It's all of us collaborating to say, "Here's where the industry needs to go.
Here's how we can increase our quality and efficiency and now altogether we can go into
the future and really push this industry forward."
What we now have is nationally consistent expectations of our work.
We have nationally consistent expectations of the work force.
It really means that we are able to put our best foot forward as a program and talk about
the good work that we've been doing for 30 years in a way that will give us another 30
years of work to do.
The accredited training and the standard work specifications and the certifications for
the workers is a huge step forward because it really shows the rest of the country that
we are really serious and that we're stepping up to create quality product and it really
is accountability of federal dollars.
We have a list of expectations.
It's not opinion anymore.
It's, "Here is the baseline for quality.
You can exceed it but you can't go below this baseline."
It puts us all on the same page, I think.
So it's extremely valuable to not have to have call backs, to know that you're putting
out a good, quality product every time.
The guidelines project is really about increasing the level of quality in the home performance
industry and inspiring greater confidence among consumers, utilities, and program administrators
around the country.
If this project didn't exist then the homeowners would certainly be the ones to be hurt because
they wouldn't know who to trust and who to believe.
I think for consumers the real value is that now they have a single way to reference good
work and a single place to go when they're looking for information about who's qualified
to do the work in their homes.
For me, if this improves the work in just one homeowner's house, if this saves one life
that to me is all that matters.
That's what this industry is about, is about really going out there and working with someone
and saying, "You don't have to live in this condition.
You don't have to be cold.
You don't have to be hot in the summertime.
You can enjoy your home.
You can have lower utility bills.
You can be safe and healthy within your home."
That's why I like this industry because it's really about service.
I don't think there is another industry that I know of or have ever come across that has
so many incredible people, smart people, dedicated people.
Some of these guys that are crawling under the bellies of mobile homes could be doing
anything, making lots of money, and yet they keep doing it because their hearts are there.