We are working on a project which includes 2, 1350sf, culinary classrooms with many industrial cooking equipment in them. The kitchen exhaust rate are as high as 1,000,000 cfh for each of these classroom. The kitchen exhaust are demand controlled and work on a cascade mode with 6 fans.
Would these system be considered HVAC? There is no way to comply with the HVAC 45dBA limit in these classrooms including the kitchen exhausts. The only way around I see would be to include an override switch to turn the exhaust off in case quiet is required.
Daniel Hicks
Daniel Hicks, E.I., INCEGeiler & Associates
267 thumbs up
September 30, 2011 - 12:20 pm
Hi Rodrigo:
I think you could make the case that these are not HVAC equipment and can be excluded if you can turn them off when they are not needed. My interpretation of LEED's explaination of "HVAC equipment" is equipment used for indoor 'climate control', and not specialty exhaust equipment. If they were designed to be on all the time, however, you might be able to make an argument that they need to be included.
Marisa Britton
Sustainable Design Consulting, LLC1 thumbs up
January 27, 2017 - 3:33 pm
Hi Rodrigo,
How did the final review of the culinary space work out? We have a similar issue!
Marisa Britton
Sustainable Design Consulting, LLC1 thumbs up
November 8, 2017 - 1:44 pm
We had a similar problem and got this feedback from GBCI, we managed to get it successfully approved.
For the purposes of calculating or measuring noise levels for the HVAC Background Noise provision of IEQp3, the operating conditions which should be assumed should be those which could be expected when good speech communication is critical to academic achievement, which is a principle cited in the definition of "classrooms and other core learning spaces." Please note that good speech communication that is critical to academic achievement includes not only instruction-based communication (lecturing by teachers to a group of students), but also includes student-to-student speech communication (i.e. partner-based or group lab type communication in a science lab or cooking area setting, etc.) per the prereq intent clause which states "and students can effectively communicate with each other."
Therefore, in this case, for Room A155 (Food Preparation Area) from the description provided of the activities within that space, it appears that the project should assume typical HVAC operating noise levels, at a minimum. In addition, depending on the type and duration of cooking activities typically performed by students, it appears reasonable to also assume that the kitchen exhaust and the makeup unit will be operating at the same time that the central HVAC operates and the students (lab partners) will need to communicate with each other, even if group lecture instruction is not occurring at the time of cooking activities. It depends upon what types and duration of lab activities are expected. Whatever assumptions are made, please provide a copy of this correspondence with the submittal, along with a narrative to justify what equipment is assumed to be operating, or not operating, when good speech communication is critical between students and during lectures.