As many may recall in the 67 days & counting article I referenced the EPA’s original study found here: . In it, they had four options for a 2-phase rollout. One option does come close to what we are looking at & it is called Option A. “All renter-occupied target housing units built before 1978, and owner-occupied target housing units built before 1978 where a child under the age of six resides.” I thought it would be interesting to see how there projected numbers compare to the facts.
| Year / # Trained or Certified in that year | Certified Firms | Certified Renovators |
| Year 1 | 163,979 | 186, 811 |
| Year 2 | 54,436 | 62,105 |
| Year 3 | 54,212 | 61,761 |
As of today’s date; 2,141 Firms have been certified & there are approx. 16,000 renovators that have been trained to date. From an article I read, the EPA is claiming that 100,000 workers will be trained by April 22nd, but they do not mention how many Certified Firms there will be.
Well let us take a quick look at the numbers:
As of this morning, there are 2141 Certified Firms in the US and there were 1806 as of March 15th. So in one week they managed to add 335 firms to the roll, or 67 per business day. Being nice, let us assume the load triples & they work every day – they would only add 6,030 new firms by April 22nd. So we might have 8200 firms when their original projection was 163,000? In order to meet that, they would have to have 5300 firms register per day – That is just not going to happen.
The Certified Renovators, we will be nice here & use the 16,000 & 100,000 numbers. So with 30 days to go we need another 84,000 Renovators. That breaks down to 2,800 being trained every day (yes, even Sunday’s). According to their new & improved Find a Trainer feature – there are only 137 trainers available. Well this one may be doable as that breaks down to 21 per day, per training organization. Now if we go with their original projections – that would be 42 a day, and a major issue.
Beyond the numbers:
What is interesting if you browse through the Certified Firm list, is how many of those companies are the window replacement companies. Most of those have plenty of installers on staff, which will skew this next number. If you look at their original projections, there are 8.7 Certified Firm’s for every 10 Certified Renovators. That means that we would need to have 87,000 Certified Firms to employ those 100,000 Certified Renovators. It appears we will be off by a factor of 10, which means that while we may have enough trained Renovators per the EPA’s revised numbers, they still will not be able to legally work on those houses that the EPA is targeting.
