Dear All,
We are working on an office project where a new building will be erected next to an existing building. Both buildings are essentially located on the same site area however for LEED purposes, we have defined a LEED project boundary for the building to be certified which is about half of the overall site area.
We have already included some LID and GI techniques within the LEED project boundary but as they are not sufficient to cover the needs of the project we are looking at installing a rainwater tank outside of the LEED project boundary, close to the existing building (i,e, within the overall site area), where part of the LEED project's boundary ranwater will be led. Is this acceptable or all the proposed LID or GI strategies must be strictly located within the defined LEED project boundary?
Kind Regards,
Aris
Dave Hubka
Practice Leader - SustainabilityEUA
LEEDuser Expert
530 thumbs up
February 25, 2022 - 8:20 am
I've done this on a past project...the only difference is that i set this up as a Campus in LEED Online and submitted a Master Site to address the items outside the project's LEED Project Boundary.
emily reese moody
Sustainability Director, Certifications & ComplianceJacobs
LEEDuser Expert
476 thumbs up
May 13, 2022 - 3:24 pm
We recently had a similar (but not exactly the same) question on one of our projects where we were asking about a retention pond located outside the LEED boundary, but within the larger property line of the owner. This is the GBCI response:
"Your inquiry was passed on to me for more technical input regarding your questions on SSc Rainwater Management and if the retention pond can contribute to compliance with the credit. A retention pond by itself does not contribute to the credit, but if paired with an LID strategy – reuse for irrigation as described below – this is acceptable. Once the chosen percentile storm event is calculated and the resulting volume across the entire LEED project boundary that must be managed on-site is known, the project team will need to determine if the reuse demand is enough to meet the credit requirements. Partial reuse of the required volume to be managed on-site is acceptable as long as the remaining volume is also managed by LID strategies – any volume beyond the chosen percentile storm event can be discharged offsite or remain in the retention pond.
Note that if the retention pond is located outside of the LEED project boundary, the project team will need to include all areas of development (existing and future buildings, hardscape, landscape, erc.) that contribute stormwater runoff to the pond in the calculations for the chosen percentile storm event. This larger boundary is acceptable to use for the LEED project seeking certification and any other future buildings that might choose to seek LEED certification."
Although I can't pinpoint which project, I do believe we similarly used campus calcs--as part of a larger, more comprehensive system--to show compliance for an individual project within that campus, but without the single projects (in our case there were two neighboring buildings) actually being registered in the LEED Campus program, and it was acceptable.
Hope that helps.