I would like to give a shout out to the folks at Efficiency Vermont for coming to our offices to meet with us! Yesterday a few of us from the Sterling crew had the great pleasure of meeting with some of the Efficiency Vermont crew. We periodically will meet with them to keep up to date on things. Our meeting yesterday focused on the National Green Building Survey and how we can work to get our homes from a Silver rating to a Gold rating. The National Green Building Survey takes a holistic look at the site, the building and building components (plumbing, HVAC, electrical, etc.), and owner education that take place during the construction process.
Efficiency Vermont comes into play with this because they actually inspect the homes that we construct twice during the construction process to act as a third party verification to NGBS that we are doing all of what we say we are doing. The first time that they come out to site is after insulation in installed. They go through and look in every nook and cranny in the house making sure that we air sealed everywhere that we possibly can and that all of the insulation in properly installed. The second time that they go out to site is to inspect the building as a whole. They inspect the faucets, lights & light bulbs, they perform a blower door test to see how tight the home is and make sure that the home is tight and that we built it like we said we would.
After they have done those inspection they submit their report to NGBS, as well as all of our supporting documentation and as long as we’ve done well, they send us back a certificate saying that the home is NGBS certified, most often as Silver. What we are trying to do is do even better. And, after a very productive meeting with Efficiency Vermont I believe they have helped to give us the tools to do better, to stay up to date, and to possibly get one of our next homes certified as Gold.