We are working on a LEED EBOM for a small professional office building (3,000 SF) in Honolulu. The Energy Star calculator will not allow us to get a rating because we are less than 5,000 SF total building space. Can we simply double the actual square footage, # of occupants, # of computers etc. to get score from Energy Star to use for EA PR2, Case 2 & EA CR1?
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Jenny Carney
Vice PresidentWSP
LEEDuser Expert
657 thumbs up
October 28, 2010 - 10:51 am
Peter, I've never had this come up before, but my hunch is that you would not be allowed to use Energy Star. It seems more likely that you'd need to follow Case 2, Option 1 and use the offline benchmarking tool. Have you investigated that approach? In any event, since this is an unusual situation you may want to reach out to GBCI directly to verify this tactic.
Peter Keithly
PrincipalTEAM Commissioning Associates
3 thumbs up
October 28, 2010 - 11:20 am
Thanks for the reply Jenny. It just seems logical (to me anyway!) that we should be able to double the variables and get the same results. That way we could continue to use Energy Star in the future to track our electricity and water usage. In any case, I will follow your advice.
Cheers, Peter
Jenny Carney
Vice PresidentWSP
LEEDuser Expert
657 thumbs up
November 4, 2010 - 5:09 pm
Let me know how it turns out. Though logical, my suspicion is that Energy Star sets the size limits because they think small buildings are fundamentally different than the larger buildings that make up their data set, and therefore they just aren't confident that the benchmarking algorithm applies.
Peter Keithly
PrincipalTEAM Commissioning Associates
3 thumbs up
November 4, 2010 - 5:39 pm
I did hear back from Energy Star and they were not supportive of my plan. Yet they did not really say why the data would be skewed and I can't think of a logical reason why the comparisons would suddenly become invalid for an office building smaller than 5,000 SF. I think I will run some test calculations through Energy Star for buildings that are 5K, 10K and 20K SF where I simply double the annual Btus/SF usage, number of occupants and number of computers. If the energy star rating stays the same, I would think that my theory makes sense. In any case, when I use another baseline calculator like the one on buildingbenchmarks.com I get more LEED points anyway, so I really don't care if I can use the EnergyStar calculator. I also have a question into GBCI on this and will let you know what they say.