Energy Vanguard Newsroom

2011 was a good year for Energy Vanguard. Our workload increased to the point where we needed more help, and at the start of the new year, we just brought in two new employees.

Energy Vanguard, a small company with a big presence, is looking for someone to help with our HVAC design work. The position will be for an intern or entry-level employee who is interested in high performance buildings, energy efficiency, and green building.

Energy Vanguard has scheduled what may be our last ENERGY STAR Version 3 class for HERS raters for the year 2011. The two-day class will be Thursday and Friday, 1-2 December 2011. Certified home energy raters who intend to maintain their status as an ENERGY STAR Partner must take the class before 1 January 2012. New raters must take the class to become an ENERGY STAR Partner.

On Thursday, 17 November 2011, Energy Vanguard president Allison Bailes and Energy Circle CEO Peter Troast will team up for a webinar called, Social Media Strategies 2.0 for Your Home Performance Business. This will be a prelude to their 2012 RESNET and Affordable Comfort conference presentations on the same topic, so if you want to get a sneak peak at what these social media leaders in the home energy community can teach you, sign up today. 

Energy Vanguard's president, Allison Bailes, along with Peter Troast, CEO of Energy Circle, had their session on internet marketing selected for the 2012 RESNET conference to be held in Austin, Texas next February. In their session they will reveal the secrets to driving traffic to your website. Their talk will also cover using social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to increase web traffic as well as many other topics.

Allison Bailes has covered the topic of  air conditioner sizing frequently in his blog posts and will be presenting a mini-workshop on the topic in the Dallas/Fort Worth area next month. Building Savvy magazine is sponsoring the presentation, which will be the second in a two part series on helping home builders and other construction professionals to comply with the new energy code as well as ENERGY STAR Version 3.

At the end of this month, Energy Vanguard's president and certified HERS trainer, Allison Bailes, will be heading to Toronto, Ontario to teach what is probably the first ever Home Energy Rater training class in Canada. The class will comprise online training modules, three days of classroom instruction, and then field work. The objective is to get students an initial certification that allows them to get started as HERS raters in Canada under the auspices of CRESNET, the Canadian Residential Energy Services Network.

Last week, Energy Vanguard received notification from the ENERGY STAR new homes team that the home plans we submitted had been approved for the Designed to Earn the ENERGY STAR label. These plans are for a new home being built in the Grant Park Historic District in Atlanta, Georgia, and are the first in the US to qualify under the Version 3 guidelines of the ENERGY STAR new homes program.

Energy Vanguard Energy Ratings (EVER), the home energy rating division of Energy Vanguard, is now a RESNET-accredited HERS sampling provider. What this means is that EVER's certified home energy raters can now offer more cost-effective home energy rating services on some projects because the sampling protocol allows HERS raters to rate one home out of a batch of homes rather than individually rating each home.

Allison Bailes, Energy Vanguard's founder and president, has accepted an invitation to join the program committee for Affordable Comfort's national conference. The committee reviews proposals for presentations, develops new sessions, and helps with planning the overall content of the conference to ensure that attendees get the most out of it.