Can anyone recommend a good school course for commercial inspections offered by distance learning? Thank you.
What kind of commercial inspections do you want to do?
A commercial inspection can be anything from a small store front, a five unit apartment building, a large office building, or hotel. Some inspections are nothing more than what you would do for a normal home inspection. Others are going to fall into catagories where you might need a specialist to come in and do part of the inspection.
Decide on what standard you want to work with whether it be the ASTM E-2018 or the InterNACHI ComSOP. If you want to get into doing large buildings with heavy equipment or complex electrical systems, there really isn’t going to be a single course out there that will cover what you need to know. Imagine walking into a huge office building to do an inspection. You are more than likely going to find either package AC units or a chiller on the roof, three phase electrical service or switch gears, circulator pumps, data cables everywhere, sprinkler systems, alarm systems, just to name a few things. I would be really impresed with any course that would be able to convey the information that would be required to conduct a thorough inspection on all of these types of systems.
Now, if you want to stick to smaller properties like small store fronts, small apartment buildings with more than 4 units, small offices, and properties like these, then most of your basic skills as a home inspector are going to be sufficient enough to provide the client with the information they want.
The best course for learning how to do commercial inspections is to actually learn how these buildings operate. You might want to contact a few local commercial buildings and see if they have a chief engineer or a building operator that you can pick their brain or follow around for a week or so. Start looking for different manufactures of commercial equipment and see if they have downloadable PDF files for their equipment. You will be suprised at what you can learn from a manual or two.
Courses like Joe Farsetta’s are very good to give you a basic idea of HOW TO SET UP and WHAT’S INCLUDED in a commercial inspection and KNOWING THE STANDARD. I highly recommend taking his course if he comes to your area. What it will not teach you is how to look at three phase electrical services, roof top chiller units, circulator pumps, or sprinkler systems.
I hope this helps.
Yeah distance learning means you will travel to what ever distance it takes to take the class right??
I am going to take this one: http://www.cdwengineering.com/home/commercial_courses.asp
Anyone attended this course? I hear it is coming to Vegas in January. That is the one I plan on attending. Maybe I will see some of you there? 
Mark,
Have you thought about taking the course with ITA? Here is the link. I would consider all options.
Find out where Mike Nelson, of NACHI, is teaching the commercial class and attend his. I attended the INACHI class in Denver last year and learned an outstanding amount of information on this type of inspection from him and INACHI. It has helped me increase this aspect of my business significantly. You won’t go wrong having him as your instructor!
We have a Commercial Inspection class coming to Boulder in two weeks. We have it going to London Ontario and Spokane Washington in July
Do you have web link for Spokane course?
I second this post Mike Nelson did a very good job and would highly recommend his class, his knowledge and his teaching methods are superior to most.
I third it.
Mike Nelson did a great job in Denver last year and I highly recommend his class.
I’m sure Joe Farsetta does a great job as well but I have not had the pleasure of attending one of Joe’s teach-ins yet.