Is janitor closet water use considered as Process Water and need to be measured apart of domestic fixtures piping?

Mauricio Toro

Project Engineer

SEQUIL Systems

LEEDuser Premium Member

2 thumbs up

Project location :

U.S. and Canada

March 31, 2022

We have been receiving comments from the LEED reviewer team asking for information to confirm that the non-fixture usage (e.g. electric water coolers / janitors sinks) is measured and can be deducted from the measured total water consumption of the building and grounds to measure the usage of the indoor plumbing fixtures (described in WEp Indoor Water Use Reduction).

To do this, we would need to provide an individual piping line only for janitor closets, which is extremely costly for any building. In addition, including this does not provide a real value for the project water management, since janitor closet water use usually represents less than 5% of the total consumption and providing a separate pipeline and measuring a low consumption water use is not going to affect the intent of the credit.

Does anybody had the same comment and how did you deal with this special requirement.

Thanks!

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Emily Purcell

Sustainable Design Lead

CannonDesign

LEEDuser Expert

379 thumbs up

Fri, 04/08/2022 - 19:31

We have received the same comment and unfortunately addressed it by considering this option impossible on future projects. It seems like GBCI has not budged on this one despite the impracticality of submetering minor process uses. Typically we pursue irrigation and domestic hot water, but the latter can be impossible as well if you have decentralized systems or tankless heaters at point of service. The 80% of process water use option is also impossible for many projects if there are many distributed process uses, but when we've had a central laundry or commercial kitchen that adds up to ~80% it has been a useful system to submeter for leak detection. Overall, would love to see more flexible options under this credit so project teams can take credit for locating meters where the owner sees value in submetering, rather than locating them at these specific systems just to earn the points.

Dave Hubka

Practice Leader - Sustainability

EUA

LEEDuser Expert

510 thumbs up

Sat, 04/09/2022 - 12:10

I agree 100% with Emily's response. The rigor of this particular credit does not always align with the needs of the owner and teams may put in water submeters to satisfy the credit but not gaining much value from the granular data collected. Water Efficiency pilot credit #115 - Whole Project Water Use Reduction allows NC projects (not CI projects) to exclude end uses that consume less than 5% of the building/site's total water consumption. Wonder if USGBC would consider a similar exclusion for the Water Metering on future updates to the credit language.