eligibility for projects with no HVAC in scope

Victoria, If HVAC is in your project scope, you can attempt this credit. If you want to expand your project scope to include the base building, you can, but I wouldn't recommend it, as you'd then be required to meet all requirements of all credits throughout the base building. The LEED Project boundary can be defined however you see fit, but you have to be consistent across all credits. Paul

I want to make sure I understand, so here's a very likely what-if scenario: The project scope only includes the addition of a few VAV boxes, but since I'm taking the energy modeling compliance path, I have to model the entire area served by that existing air handler. If what you say is true, then the entire area served by that AHU is now in the LEED project boundary and all areas served by it must comply with all the LEED-CI credits. Is this correct?

Mark, That get's a bit dicey. In that case, if I were you, I'd argue that since no changes were made to the actual air-handler, only the VAV boxes are in the project scope and structure my submission accordingly. If the reviewer disagreed, you'd have a chance to change it before the final review. Paul

We have successfully gotten LEED certification on renovations where we only included the VAV box zones for the project. We got (under LEED CI-2.0) both parts of the option 1 credit by stating that the base building HVAC unit was chilled water so the equipment efficiency requirement was N/A (doesn't preclude project from getting points) and the second part by demonstrating the zoning met the requirements, even when we were using existing boxes. We just had to demonstrate that the systems as balanced (either existing or part of the renovation) were investigated to meet the actual loads and our zoning met the other requirements (perimeter/interior requirements and occupancy control of setpoints for offices/conf rms/etc.). I've always interpreted this credit as LEED not wanting to punish tenants for the base building systems in the certification process - they recognize the tenants don't have that much control over central systems. Having said that, we haven't been through this with the version 3 reviewers yet.