Garret Little, NABCEP PVIP - Garret just passed his NABCEP exam!!! Celebrate!!‪!‬ Sean White‘s Solar and Energy Storage Podcast

One week before recording this podcast, Garret Little passed his NABCEP PVIP exam. In this podcast we talk about his experience taking the exam 9 years after his first try and getting a really good score! We also talk about the exam experience, memory techniques, taking the Ecotech class vs. the HeatSpring class for preparing for the exam. There is nothing more important for passing an exam than knowing what to study.
 
Here is the class Garret took to pass the NABCEP PVIP exam:
 
NABCEP PV Installation Professional (PVIP) Certification Prep
 
Garret also has installed PV systems in Nepal and Colombia.
 
Here is a list of topics we covered:
 
Exam Prep
NABCEP PV Installation Professional (PVIP) exam
NABCEP Energy Storage Installation Professional (ESIP)
NABCEP PV Associate (PVA)
NABCEP PV Technical Sales (PVTS)
NABCEP PV Design Specialist (PVDS)
NABCEP PV Commissioning and Maintenance Specialist (PVCMS)
NABCEP PV Installer Specialist (PVIS)
NABCEP PV System Inspector (PVSI)
Meazure Online exam platform
Taking the exam in person like Garret did
Kaplan CleanTech (no longer in business)
Brian Hayden the Founder of HeatSpring and super cool dude
Tom Chatagnier Solar Saint from Diablo Valley College
Live online proctoring from home vs. testing center for NABCEP exam
Dry erase board for test notes
ESIP = Energy Storage Installation Professional NABCEP Certification
Colombian Comedian into solar
Brittany, Brit, Brian, South, James and Nycx
Learning techniques
Memory techniques
State dependent memory
Short term memory
Long term memory
Quantum memory
Memorizing Pi
 
Here is from the email Garret sent me after passing the exam:
 
Hey Sean,
I just wanted to express my gratitude towards you for the classes you teach through Heatspring. Hopefully my name rings a bell as I have sent a few messages recently via the 58-hour course, one particular about question 30 on the 1-30 bonus practice exam - looks like the Heatspring team is pretty dang on top of it to make changes, so kudos to them!
 
I took the PVIP yesterday morning and passed with an 87%. I can't express enough just how instrumental this course was in my confidence and ultimately, results. I took the PVIP nine years ago and was far underprepared and it's been a dark cloud looming over me since and when I finally would apply to retake it, I never really had direction in what to study, so I honestly just didn't take it and wasted money and time applying. This time around, after finding out about Heatspring, I signed up back in September of last year and went to work, and boy am I happy I did. 
 
The very first thing I noticed during the start of the 40-hour course was how easy it was to stay attentive. The videos and lectures are engaging. Listening to you isn't a chore like many online courses, and please for the sake of everyone, don't ever stop cracking little jokes throughout like the white house being your house, or pointing out the solar "clip art" guy with the blue shirt who appears to be "measuring a module with a fluorescent wire...?". These things make the biggest difference and I absolutely wish more online lecturers leaned a little more into that!
 
This course really covered everything I experienced on the exam and in all honesty, to me it seemed it presented quite a bit more information and material than the NABCEP covered, at least from my experience . For example, I don't think I had one string sizing question, conduit fill, or even conductor sizing with derates (if my memory serves me right). It was not nearly as much calculations as I had anticipated, aside from interconnection calcs, which were all fairly similar. With that being said, I feel tremendously more knowledgeable than I was even just a few months ago prior to taking this course and I am so thankful for that.
 
Thank you again so much for working with Heatspring on these courses to provide such  thorough, entertaining, and educational content. It feels so incre