COMPREHENSIVE Green Building Course: Table of Contents

This is not a fluff course just because it’s free. You’ve never seen anything like this.

This is a pass/fail test designed to qualify inspectors to provide neutral third party verification of green features in residential and light commercial buildings.
It’s written for inspectors. It’s purpose is to help you make money, improve your inspection skills and to give you objective information about important issues while providing you with continuing education credits.

It includes detailed photos and instructions for looking at PV, solar thermal, hydronic heating and much more. It will teach the basics about what you can inspect safely with limited liability and what you should disclaim, and it will provide links to sites or organizations which will give you more detailed information.

Please take a look…
[ol]
[li]INTRODUCTION[/li]
[li]ENERGY[LIST=1][/li][li]Report on Energy Status[/li][li]Non-renewable Energy[/li][li]Renewable Energy[/li][/ol]
[li]CLIMATE CHANGE[/li][ol]
[li]Climate Change[/li][li]Natural Climate Change[/li][li]Possible Results of Climate change[/li][/ol]
[li]WATER[/li][ol]
[li]Groundwater Depletion[/li][li]Water Quality[/li][li]Home Water Treatment[/li][li]Indoor Water Conservation[/li][li]Outdoor Water Conservation[/li][/ol]
[li]LOT DEVELOPMENT[/li][ol]
[li]Erosion[/li][li]Landscaping and Grading[/li][/ol]
[li]BUILDING METHODS[/li][ol]
[li]Engineered Lumber[/li][li]Value Engineering[/li][li]Enhanced-efficiency Building Methods[/li][li]Strawbale Homes[/li][/ol]
[li]BUILDING ENVELOPE[/li][ol]
[li]Climate Zones[/li][li]Insulation[/li][li]Conduction, Convection and Radiation[/li][li]Air Movement in Buildings[/li][li]Attic Ventilation[/li][li]Moisture Control[/li][li]Mold[/li][/ol]
[li]PASSIVE SOLAR HOMES[/li][ol]
[li]Passive Solar Home Design[/li][li]Energy-efficient Windows[/li][/ol]
[li]PHOTOVOLTAIC (PV) SYSTEMS[/li]
[li]SOLAR THERMAL (solar water heating)[/li]
[li]LIGHTING[/li][ol]
[li]Lighting: Bulb and Fixture Types[/li][li]Daylighting and Controls[/li][/ol]
[li]PLUMBING[/li][ol]
[li]Plumbing Pipes[/li][li]Hydronic Heating[/li][li]Hot Water Recirculation Systems[/li][/ol]
[li]HVAC[/li][ol]
[li]Furnaces[/li][li]Air-conditioners[/li][li]Air ducts[/li][li]Evaporative Coolers[/li][li]Humidifiers[/li][li]Heat Pumps[/li][/ol]
[li]WOOD-BURNING APPLIANCES[/li][ol]
[li]Wood Stoves[/li][/ol]
[li]ROOF[/li][ol]
[li]Roof Defects[/li][li]Green Roofs[/li][/ol]
[li]INDOOR ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS[/li][ol]
[li]Radon[/li][li]Asbestos[/li][/ol]
[li]SUSTAINABLE PRACTICES and MATERIALS[/li][ol]
[li]Sustainability[/li][li]Standards and Certification[/li][/ol]
[li]ENERGY PROGRAMS AND LEGISLATION[/li][ol]
[li]Incentives: Renewable-energy/Energy-efficiency[/li][li]Home Energy Audits[/li][li]Home Energy Ratings[/li][li]Energy Codes[/li][li]Green Building Standards[/li][li]Energy (Labeling) Program Comparisons[/li][li]Green Mortgages[/ol][/li][/LIST]TAKE THE COURSE

Kenton;

I would like to be the first one to acknowledge the excellent job you have done to organize and establish a package like this together for all of the Members of InterNACHI to enjoy and learn while taking this course.

Remarkably put together and the effort needed to compile all the information and orchestrate it’s functionality in layout was extremely well executed.

I will myself take the course for my own benefit and hope that many will follow and take advantage of this learning information to help keep up with what is eventually going to be our future.

Congratulations on your work, very well done.

Marcel :slight_smile: :smiley:
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Good work.

Kick a$s course!

Kenton, check out the sponsor of your course… underneath the screen http://www.nachi.tv/episode12

Fantastic job , with lots of effort.

Most of us (most of us still in business) paid to take courses when we decided to become home inspectors.

NACHI TV produces episodes which cover a wide range of subjects, all inspection-related, all with professionals, all in an effort to give inspectors an education they can’t get anywhere else, and they do it for free!

Check out what it costs to take courses from Inspection schools. Then check out what it costs to develop everything related to creating a TV studio including hiring qualified staff and equipping them with state-of-the-art equipment, building a studio, finding and arranging sites, professionals and actors. Except for one thing…

Everyone appearing on NACHI TV is what they appear to be. No one is an actor (you probably couldn’t tell). Those you see interviewed on NACHI TV are there because they have something interesting or important to share with you. NACHI TV is a great resource!

Thanks Marcel, John and Robert!

One point. In the climate change section, that CO2 graph has been proven to be false.

Regardless of what some want, CO2 is not a pollutant.

Hope this helps;

Because it isn’t DIRECTLY dangerous?

Because CO2 is plant food.

I know that Green is the new green and everyone wants to jump on the latest fad bandwagon.

And I mean no disrespect to Kenton (darned good and comprihensive job on this course!!) but a great deal of this “green” thing is so much crap.

Is the Earth warming up from what it was recently? Yes. The peak was reached in 1998. The earth warms and cools in regular cycles (remember about 1000 years ago when Greenland was actually green?).

Is mankind contributing to this warming? Yes, but very little. The amount of CO2 that is man created is negligable.

Should we do a better job with conservation and efficiency? Yes.

But the “green roof” fad that is so hyped around here is just a joke. When people come to realize (as they are starting to) the extra costs involved with replacing the roof, all cost benefits are lost.

Mr. Gore has put together a nice piece of fiction. It is amazing that he won the Nobel prize, along with the U.N. group, when the two reports differed so much.

When you ask actual climate scientists (as opposed to scientists from other fields, political activists, hangers on and lawyers representing fringe groups) the situation is not nearly as grave as it is popularly believed.

Remember global cooling, from the 70s?

This is a good course, no doubt, and I enjot it and learn alot. But I would be careful in my research and in the political preaching which have very little to do with the facts of home inspection and building science.

Please read “the politically incorrect guide to global warming”. Very well researched and documented, with sources taken from actual scientificly valid sources.

Remember the whole “electromagnetic radiation” scare thing from a few years ago. That was real popular and some people did testing. It to was based more on fads than on actual science.

Sorry if this puts a damper on thic course. Not my intention. Just want to make it better and leave the pseudo science out.

Will, have you been reading the kneed to know thread again?

Nope. Just some journals and the U.N. IPCC report. If you look at the UN report, you will see that most of the confrence members were not scientists, but politicians and other various hangers on.

Excuse me, as someone who has done science and research and is published, these reports are more government fiat than scientific studies.

Will go check that thread out if you haven’t already. I’ve been posting much of what you said for over a year now.
It’s on a Canadian thread because Charley asked a humorous question one day and it has snowballed from there.
It’s predominantly my posting but once in a while someone will come and give their opions.

The IPCC reports are produced primarily for politicians and we are seeing more and more of the garbage they have in store for us.:mad:

Trying to figure out what was true and real was most of the battle in researching this course, especially in climate change. That and the non-renewable energy section. They drove me crazy! I spent weeks and weeks on them. I could have spent months on them alone. People spend their lives working on this stuff.
I found various CO2 charts with various numbers and I had finally to pick one. Know a better one? Send me the link… please!

As far as the term “pollution”, I use it loosely. If it’s in the air and it’s bad, to me it’s pollution. Is CO2 a crucial part of the global environment? Sure it is! We wouldn’t be here without it. Is putting 30 billion tons of it a year into the air, year after year, going to have an effect? That possibility doesn’t seem outlandish to me.

I’m not on or off the climate-change bandwagon. I included a Natural Climate Change section because climate on earth does change naturally and people seem to forget that. It’s about “climate” not “weather”. They seem to forget that. I’ve got links at the end of that Climate Change section to a website by scientists who are not on the climate change bandwagon. ([Climate Science](http://www.nachi.org/forum/CLIMATE SCIENCE))

I think to make a really informed decision on climate change requires reading the scientific studies and reports from a number of sources. Most of the mass media is corporate-owned and their concern is their bottom line, not the truth. It takes work to get past the bull$hit and find the beef and most people aren’t concerned enough to do it. Then again you have to have a good enough background to recognise it when you see it.

I’m open to suggestions for sources of good, hard information such as studies and reports. During research and writing I didnt have time to actually look at individual IPCC reports. I looked at a couple tonight and was impressed not so much with the report content (randomly picked, links below) but with the credentials. Then again, I’m not a scientist.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/289/5487/2068#RF5

http://folk.uio.no/gunnarmy/paper/sausen_mz05.pdf

icecap.us/index.php/go/faqs-and-myths

http://CO2Science.com

http:// Junkscience.com

http://www.realclimate.org/

What’s important are the qualifications of the people and organizations who performed the studies and created the report. They were not “politicians and other various hangers”. Information about the members of the three working goups and task force who did the reasearch and assembled the report is availablehere. What’s important is the content, not the audience.
Actually here’s a list of the authorsfrom Working Group I.

here’s a bio of one of the authors…

DR. MICHAEL PRATHER (Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine). Dr. Prather works in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research on global science and environmental issues, providing a link between the intelligence community and the policy bureaus. He has initiated and drafted assessments of the current state of knowledge on hurricanes, illegal logging, and climate change. In addition to his own scientific expertise in earth and environmental science, he has provided a link to university colleagues in emerging technologies such as genetic engineering. Dr. Prather will travel to the environmental hub offices in the embassies of Costa Rica and Brazil to work with the regional science and technology officers. He is planning a summer conference on the role of disaster risk management in a world of changing climate.

Kenton, IMHO if the content is influenced by an agenda it ia already suspect. There have been real scientists who were sited in the IPCC report that have asked their name to be remove. Than should give one pause.