Sustainable Heating Realtor and Appraiser Training

Sustainable Heating Realtor and Appraiser Training

Course Title: Home Heating Systems: Comfort, Cost, Convenience, and Climate Change

Heating is complicated and as The Northeast Wood Heat Region seeks to incentivize ways to reduce heating pollution to achieve each state’s green energy goals, fuel options and heating system technologies are becoming increasingly complex.

This talk details available heating options, costs, incentives, and environmental impacts. We will dig into retrofits and which emerging appliances work, as well as the ones that sound good but currently have limitations.

Attendees will learn the right questions to ask sellers, how to set appropriate expectations for buyers, and how heating issues can play a role in the purchase and sale contract.

By the end of the presentation, realtors will own a new confidence in their ability to be conversant with buyers, sellers, and heating professionals.

Continuing Education Credits

This course is approved for Realtor Continuing Education Credits in Vermont and New Hampshire. Massachusetts CEUs pending.

Course Materials

This two-hour course is based on Sustainable Heating’s six-page “Heating System Evaluation Worksheet” which compares and contrasts all currently available heating technologies.

Attendees qualify to receive the free “Realtor’s Guide to Sustainable Heating” which covers the primary concepts detailed in the class.

Presenter’s Bio

Jeffrey Rubin is a real estate investor and executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group sustainableheating.org. Over the past 30 years he has at various times held a realtor license in the states of New York and Vermont. He spends his time presenting environmental sales trainings to heating contractors, answering homeowner questions about their heating systems, and getting students and other groups fired up about the vital role of home heating in climate change.

Heat Loss

The two variables of of heat loss are a) geographic location, and b) building performance. Together they will determine the quantity of heat needed to maintain comfort.

Geographic location drives the building's “design day." Your design day is the difference in temperature between the inside and outside of your house on the theoretical coldest day of the year; so in the northeast we calculate a day that is -10ºf outside and comfortable 68ºf inside. This is referred to as the “delta-T” value. A typical delta-T for the northeast is 78º.

Building performance is the big one because there’s nothing we can do about geographic location. Today we can build a really tight thermal envelope, but most of our heating pollution comes from the millions of homes built over the last 100-150 years. We are getting better at buttoning-up those old buildings with insulation and weather sealing but weatherization is still  never going to be enough to overcome the heat loss from a 78º delta-T. That means we need heating systems that can quickly put a whole lot of heat back into those old houses on the days that are really cold.