"Mercury-free lamps, such as LEDs, can be included in the picogram per lumen-hour calculations only if they have efficiency levels that are equal to or greater than those of comparable mercury-containing counterparts."
What documentation is required to prove this? We are including some halogen lamps that have no mercury in our purchasing plan. We have the MSDS for each lamp. Do we then also need to get MSDS for some other lamps that we are not using, just to show that our lamp has higher lumen/watt than a mercury lamp? I guess my question is: how do we decide which lamp is comparable? It seems sort of random, like I could search out any mercury containing lamp and just find one that is less efficient than mine so I can include mine in the plan.
We also purchased LED lights during our performance period. Can we include those in Table 4-2 in order to drive down our overall picogram per lumen-hour number? Will those require additional comparison information as well?
Nadav Malin
CEOBuildingGreen, Inc.
LEEDuser Expert
844 thumbs up
January 15, 2014 - 9:39 am
Hi Helen,Halogen lamps are not as efficient as mercury-containing fluorescents and metal halides, so you can't include those in your purchasing plan. (Halogens are a type of incandescent.)The LEDs may or may not be as efficient. You need to check on the performance specs for those. For documentation you'd provide spec sheets showing the efficacy. There are examples of all the different types of documentation needed in the Resources area of this LEEDuser credit page--that's available to paying LEEDuser members.Nadav
Deepthy KB
Sustainability Consultant, LEED APEY
February 16, 2014 - 5:33 am
Hi,
For our project in Dubai, the total number of Lamps in the building is 8905. We included 8852 lamps in the purchasing plan with an overall Mercury content of 71.2 pg/lm hr. During the Performance Period, the total number of lamps purchased was 920 with overall Mercury content of 52.5 pg/lm hr. After the preliminary review, the USGBC review team has asked us to verify the energy efficiency of 2 of our Halogen lamps in comparison to their mercury containing counterparts with documentation.
I would appreciate if any of you could provide input on the exclusion principle of MR C4 which says 90% of "mercury containing lamps". In the Purchasing plan, even if I exclude these 2 Halogen lamps, it does not affect the total, and 90% of 8905 would still be accounted for. But, since these Halogen lamps were purchased during the performance period, excluding them would only account for 85% of the total Performance Period Purchases. If we can be confident that the calculations (for both Purchasing plan and Performance Purchases) are applicable only to mercury containing lamps, we could respond to the USGBC excluding these from both calculations irrespective of their effect on the total numbers. Could someone verify?
Brian Salazar
President, LEED AP, WELL APEntegra Development & Investment, LLC
56 thumbs up
July 24, 2014 - 12:54 pm
I am a bit confused by this for the simple fact that there is no fluorescent equivalent to most Halogen MR16 bulb. Functionally, only LED replacements can be used to substitute for Halogen in most applications.