While the Water Use Reduction Additional Guidance document, (updated August 16, 2010), clearly address’ how to calculate total daily uses both with and without urinals. It does NOT address what to do if only a certain percent of the male restrooms have urinals, (let’s say you have urinals in the core restrooms but not one in unisex/single user restroom).
A reviewers comment has come back as follows: "when projects contain male-accessible restrooms without urinals, weighted calculations must be performed to adjust the total daily uses for each fixture related to that fixture group." Has anyone run into this issue and/or have a recommendation? I expect these single use toilet rooms will be used infrequently (since there is only 1 toilet) as compared to the core toilet rooms (which have multiple water closet and urinal fixtures).
Brian Moran
21 thumbs up
November 22, 2011 - 7:44 pm
Rand
I apologize that I do not have any answer for you but wanted to chime in and second what you have said. We have just received the same review comment. I agree as well that the review team's language was significantly insufficient in assisting us address this error. They referred us tthe same document but it says nothing in regards to how address this issue. If I come across something that is of assistance to us I will send it your way.
Susan Walter
HDRLEEDuser Expert
1299 thumbs up
November 23, 2011 - 8:30 am
Can you logically assign a user group to the single bathroom and then break it down? Let's say only FTE will have access to the single room and they are located to one side of a building. You could determine the number of FTE likely to use the single room (by travel distance) and 50% of that figure will not be using urinals. This way your visitors/transients groups are all using the core toilets. You could either add a fixture group or assign the urinals a percentage of use based on all your occupancy figures.
Emily Catacchio
Sustainability SpecialistWight and Company
610 thumbs up
November 23, 2011 - 11:50 pm
Rand,I'm not sure I agree with your assumption that the single toilet rooms will be used infrequently, unless they are private. If it's possible at this point in design I'd reccomend adding urinals to the restrooms in question if these points are paramount to your project. That may seem extreme, but I think it will be difficult to make an arguement here. Everyone who uses the private restrooms will be flushing the toilet because they do not have the option to use a urinal.
Jonathan Weiss
Jacobs Buildings & Infrastructure215 thumbs up
January 10, 2012 - 4:43 pm
We have successfully documented this under LEED 2.2 by counting fixtures - so if we have 10 fixtures in public men's restrooms (7 stalls and 3 urinals), and 2 unisex toilet rooms, we've assumed an even distribution of 12 uses, so the percentage without access to urinals is 2/12. I could not determine a good way to justify more or less frequent use of any one toilet room over another. It may not be perfect, but it is close. I often try to encourage adding urinals as Emily recommends, but it often not feasible.