Hi! I have two Core & Shell projects where the landlord is providing showers and changing rooms. There's a toilet inside the changing room area. I have separated this fixture out into its own fixture group where the usage pattern is 100% Female (I was told to do this to get the calcs right because there's no urinal associated with the locker room fixture group.)
During the initial review, the LEED team kicked the WE calculations back because the modified Total Daily Usage rate for the locker room toilet was 10%, which admittedly was an arbitrary number that I picked up from an article on what percentage of people use showers at the workplace, then I doubled the number. The LEED team wrote back, "The calculations for the Locker Room fixture group indicate a water closet total daily uses value that differs from the standard calculation methodology. "
My question is, what is the standard calculation mythology in this scenario? If I don't change the "Total Daily Uses" to something more sensible, the water calcs get driven down because the table essentially assumes that 305 women are using that toilet, in addition to the other 152.5 women already using the other toilets in the building.
Thanks for some guidance here.
Carlie Bullock-Jones
PrincipalEcoworks Studio
LEEDuser Expert
220 thumbs up
January 22, 2016 - 9:02 am
Hi Brian,
As you may have gathered, there is no standard calculation methodology for this scenario. I agree that it is unlikely 100% of the building users will use the locker room water closet three times per day (the standard default), in addition to the core restroom water closets three times per day (thereby inflating the overall total daily uses for water closet usage).
In this case I would suggest a couple of ways to calculate in the Form:
1) Keep your calculation methodology the same (as a separate fixture group, set to 100% Female) and provide an narrative/supporting documentation explaining your daily usage methodology (i.e. research on the % of people that use the showers at the workplace).
2) Don’t create a separate fixture group for the locker rooms and simply modify the default Total Daily Uses for water closets and urinals in the form to account for the percentage of male occupants that are expected to use the locker restrooms without urinals. You will still need to provide a narrative and supporting daily use calculations to explain the anticipated urinal usage (i.e. % of male occupants will use the locker restrooms that do not contain urinals – this % could be calculated based on the total number of fixtures in the project and/or restrooms with vs. without urinals).
Hope this helps!
Brian Salazar
President, LEED AP, WELL APEntegra Development & Investment, LLC
56 thumbs up
January 22, 2016 - 9:40 am
Thanks Carlie - I will probably opt for Option 1 since it's the closest to what I submitted on the first go-round. What I don't understand is how the reviewer could come up with language as specific as "standard calculation methodology" yet not offer any basis for where one might find such methodology. I've done a handful of CS projects before and this has never been a problem, of course in those projects, the shower room is usually located within one of the building restrooms, not a separate room like this one. However, the reviewer in those cases has never asked that toilet usage be calculated any differently. In this case where I actually preemptively offer to separate out the shower room toilet, they come back with terminology that makes no sense. It's getting to be too much.
Brian Salazar
President, LEED AP, WELL APEntegra Development & Investment, LLC
56 thumbs up
January 22, 2016 - 10:29 am
OK, I found this one study with a chart at the very bottom that states approx 7% of people who exercise do so during work hours. It's conjecture, but it's the only thing I can find from hours of Googling. Hope it helps someone else too!
http://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2008/sports/