Summary

An important goal for SU•PER•B is to help raise the level of knowledge and skill toward developing, operating and using sustainable buildings.

To do so, SU•PER•B engages in a number of education-related actions, including:

• Develops guidelines, standards, and content for educational seminars and webinars providing informaiton about high performance, low energy buildings.
• Presents at educational seminars and webinars on high performance, low energy buildings.
• Develops cyber-based educational software such as Learn HVAC (see www.learnhvac.org)
• Develops and provides interactive educational websites such as www.ecoadvisor.org.
• Develops and provides interactive educational CDs.
• Collaborates with others in providing eLearning products to improve building sustainability.

We invite you to explore our educational activities and products.

The need for education

Saving energy in buildings involves not just added new widgets and technologies. High efficiency equipment that is not properly installed, calibrated, tested, operated or maintained will typically save far less energy than estimated. Thus, a critical need today and into the future is to train skilled people to design, construct, operate, and maintain the increasingly complex buildings and systems.

Today, many commercial buildings do not fully use their capabilities and are not properly commissioned, operated or maintained, which leads to inefficient operation, increased energy use, and reduced lifetimes of the equipment. Further compounding the problem is the lack of properly trained building operators and managers. Many experts estimate the inefficiency in building operations range between 10 to 30%.

Addressing the need

We support a major initiative to provide Computer-Based workforce development to increase skill levels as a major means of increase the operational efficiency and sustainability of existing and new buildings. One major objective is to transform building operations in commercial buildings by raising the problem-solving and troubleshooting skills of technicians, building operators, commissioning agents, architects, engineers, and other building industry professionals.

One path to improved building performance is to raise the level of understanding of (1) proper, energy-efficient HVAC and lighting operations and controls on the part of building operators and technicians, and of (2) proper system-level troubleshooting methods and approaches to solve problems when they occur. The proposed energy enhancements to emerging LearnHVAC aand LearnGreenBuilding r software focus on teaching system-level troubleshooting skills along with skills in communications and teamwork. Such awareness will help operators and technicians in the field to improve building operations, maintenance and energy efficiency.