ACI Conference - Tuesday, March 30th, 2011

Never having been to an ACI Conference before and, more importantly, never having been to a conference at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco, any normal person (me) would Google the place to find out where to park.  Entering the address of the Marriott Marquis placed it right in the main part of the Moscone Center and since I'd been to a couple of other conferences at the Moscone, I assumed it must be there.  After parking in the cheap seat parking garage a few blocks a few long blocks south of Moscone, I find no one at Moscone has heard of the ACI; in fact, there's a completely different conference there this week.  Yank out the smart phone, try and make out the minuscule print and find the Marriott is actually several blocks *north* of Moscone.  Drag my bags.. anyway, you don't need to hear all this.  I made it.

Monday is what's called the "Pre-Conference Summit", costs an extra several hundred bucks and did not include enough of interest for me to attend.  If you're interested, the ACI Conference website lists what went on that day.  I want to talk about my personal view of the Conference so this Blog starts on Tuesday.

Tuesday has two parts to it: it's the second and last day of the Pre-Conference Summit but it also has several 4 hour classes in the morning and several more in the afternoon and are included in the Core Conference, even though the Core Conference doesn't start until Wednesday.  4 of the 5 morning courses were designed for specialty trades - insulating sidewalls, optimizing HVAC, etc. - so I went to the 5th, which sounded right up my alley, House as a System.

David Keefe is an experienced, quality speaker who has apparently retired from a few decades of working in the Efficiency field and now speaks.  It's not easy to speak for 4 hours with only a 15 minute break.  He warned us early in the session that it would be a fairly basic but complete going over of the Home Performance field and that's what it was.  He spend an hour or more setting up and describing concepts and history, and the rest of the time talking about how things are done and going over in detail why we have to be so careful about indoor air quality issues when we tighten up a house.  Using several detailed examples, he kept coming back to the idea that Home Performance Contracting is a large and complex discipline and if people are considering entering it, they must buy in to the 'house as a system' or risk serious health and safety consequences.  4 hours is a long time when I already know and believe what he was talking about so I sat in the back rows where I could micro-nod off in peace.  I slipped out for a while to check in to my hotel before returning in time to get CEU credits for the course. (Oops, did I just say too much?  BPI?)

The afternoon selection was an easy one: John Snell and Matt Schwoegler of the Snell Group were here from Vermont to talk about IR cameras and that course was GREAT!  Fun speakers in a tag team fashion, plenty of humorous examples of mistakes made amd enough new tips to keep me busy with my camera for months. Great stuff.  I've been wanting to take Snell's Level 1 Thermography class but it's $1500, which is out of my budget for the foreseeable future but apparently they're trying to put together a simpler class just for us Building Energy Nerds who will only be certified to use our IR cameras on building and promise we won't try to explain why the sky measures -22 degrees or other non-building questions.  The down side is that RESNET, one of my HERS certifying agencies, is eventually going to require this certification.

I've met several folks that I know already and I expect to meet more on Wednesday, when more people arrive for the main part of the Conference.  An impressing number of people fly in from other States.  So Wednesday morning - it's off to the Main Floor to meet up with quite a few people that I only know from phone conversations.  It'll be great to put faces to the names.