Overall, the prerequisites in this category are going to add significant cost to a base LEED certification over LEED 2009. I'd like to hear from commissioning agents out there as to what you think the fee increase for Fundamental Cx will be with the addition of envelope, all electrical, and plumbing to the commissioning scope.
In addition, most projects will be adding several extra water meters for the Water Metering pre-req.
Scott Bowman
LEED FellowIntegrated Design + Energy Advisors, LLC
LEEDuser Expert
519 thumbs up
September 16, 2011 - 9:23 am
Julie, you are correct, this is going to add cost to fundamental. For mechanical systems, it would be shifting some costs from enhanced to fundamental.
Electrical is too vague in this version, leading to uncertainty, which just like our financial markets, leads to wide variations in price and service. You can required anything you want, and good firms will follow those requirements, but there will be low cost providers that will submit just about anything and if there is no enforcement, there will be no accountability.
The envelope component is the most worrisome for me, in that there is a huge variety in scope for this service. We do not provide this service, but we work with several firms that do, sometimes as sub-consultants to us. They do extremely good work, and the service is extremely valuable. But I have learned that the scope is extremely important, and must match the owners concerns and budget; just like commissioning really.
I do not want to come off as totally negative, but I would like to see more definition to the Cx process, mostly to help providers to compete on qualifications and abilities, instead of who can get away with the least. It is also interesting that as we have been documenting v2009, GBCI is asking for less and less documentation for fundamental…which means less and less oversight to me. Yet they want to increase the rigor in v2012? Will they also increase the submittal requirements. As others have probably seen in some of my posts, we tend to submit everything…why not? We want to show a complete process and the documentation we develop for the owner anyway.