We have a manufacturing campus and are assessing a new office block within that campus. Within this block there are large toilet and shower facilities that will be used by everyone on the entire site. Therefore I have calculated the FTE for the entire site. This has been submitted for preliminary review and GBCI had no issue with that. Since that review the client informs me of a new project within the campus that they would like to use LEED on.
The people who will be using the second building are already included within the FTE of the first building, as they will be using the facilities within the offices. Therefore when we come to calculate the FTE of the second building for Wep1, I was going to put the actual staff number. My worry is that we are double counting the toilet and showers facilities over 2 projects and if that will cause an issue? But understand that we need to include actual facilities used for start getting credits?
Any help is much appreciated.
Melissa Merryweather
DirectorGreen Consult-Asia
245 thumbs up
January 29, 2016 - 9:34 pm
I've had a similar issue with a factory that we had certified several years ago. The office was in one certification package, a key factory building in another. The canteen in the office serves the entire factory so we had water use crossover in two projects. The fact is that you can't have a LEED building with no toilet facilities, yet the actual water use in the your office building project must be based on the total FTE as you calculated it. So there is a peculiar overlap in your case but it is what it is. WEp1/WEc3 water use for your new project is calculated with your new building's FTE only. Since the toilet block is existing, and since its not regularly occupied, it is only a feature of the Wep1 / WeC3 credits and no others but you'll need to include it in the building plan set. ( best to highlight the area). What I'm not sure is whether or not you need to include the toilet block in the total GFA of the building and include as "existing building" in the Pf2 form. I think you must but best to check. I believe you could put these figures into a narrative at the bottom of the form (I often have non-regular projects and narratives seem to work well), but you could also just contact the reviewers directly and ask them.