Day 2: Teaching @ YouthBuild Holyoke

The last post was somewhat vague. The reason I'm teaching is because my graduate program at UMass (green building) has partnered with a local non-profit organization in Holyoke, MA. The goal of the program is to give low-income youth a chance to excel in an emerging and exciting new field; that of energy auditing.

The federal stimulus package has alocated 5 billion dollars toward weatherization, "$4.5 billion for federal building upgrades and another $4.5 billion in matching funds to update the country's energy grid" (Croston, MSNBC Article). This has created a huge demand for energy auditors. "Low-income weatherization programs are an ideal way to start because the construction to make energy-efficient homes creates jobs... the Department of Energy's goal to retrofit 10 million homes per year for the next couple decades,"and this will create about 1.25 million "green jobs".

I am teaching 11 students the fundamentals of energy auditing in the 1st of 4 modules. In a few months they will begin to shadow professional energy auditors in the field who do air sealing, weatherization, and tightening of building envelopes on a daily basis.

One of the tools we use is called a "blower door test". This tool is used as a way to locate air leakage sites in a building so that they can be sealed (thus saving the owner/occupant money on their heating and cooling bills). Here are a few pictures from yesterday of us at YouthBuild Holyoke performing a blower door test (it was their first time ever seeing one).

Setting up the blower door.

Describing how the Pressure and Flow Guage work, and what numbers to look for.

Turning up the fan speed!

We found that the room is very leaky - it wouldn't reach 50 pascals!

I'm usually up front with the laptop/powerpoint and projector, but this class we had a "hands on" activity. They seemed to enjoy it a lot more than just sitting around listening to me blab for 2.5 hours.

Here they are using the infrared camera that our program has. This piece of equipment is worth something like $15,000 - BE CAREFUL!

Yesterday's class turned out excellent. The kids really responded well to using the equipment we have and seemed to get really excited about becoming energy auditors. Unfortunately I've already brought in most of the equipment that our program has to offer! It's going to be hard to top this class unless I can get ahold of a few solar panels for Tuesday... can anyone help me with this? A giant wind turbine would work, too...