Our project is a large office building with commercial kitchen (in house breakfast/lunch, etc). The building has hot water heaters for the kitchen, and a hot water heaters for everything else (basically restrooms). The systems are separate. The credit language suggests domestic hot water as a submeter category, it does not, though, list kitchen domestic hot water as a submeter category. Do you believe we would be able to submit just he kitchen domestic hot water as a sub-meter category? Do you believe GBCI would only accept that if we stated that kitchen domestic hot water is 80% or more of all building domestic hot water (i.e., kitchen plus other systems total)? Since the commercial kitchen has a combination of sinks, sprayers, dishwashers, etc. might GBCI suggest that sub-metered kitchen domestic hot water would have to be counted as "process". If we end up having to state that our kitchen domestic hot water is 80% or more of total - do you have any suggestions on how we demonstrate that (keeping in mind, there are, obviously, no meters on those other users to show they are 20% or less).
Thank you
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Michael Smithing
Director - Green Building AdvisoryColliers International Ltd.
304 thumbs up
March 5, 2014 - 6:35 am
Everything that I've seen so far indicates that the kitchen water would be considered process water. Domestic hot water appears to be the hot water which you are not sub-metering. If you have a sub-meter on all the water for the restaurant kitchen then perhaps you can document the process water. Do you have other process wate uses such as feature pools or car wash facilities?
Tom Kennedy
consulting engineerEnhanse
18 thumbs up
March 13, 2014 - 9:44 pm
There is a water feature outside the main building public entry. It is only used in summer. It is on the north side and the sun does not hit it. It is a "reflecting pool" style (so water is still). I did some calcs and figured evaporation is only about 1% of total building water usage for the year. Irrigation and cooling towers are "process", but those have their own sub-meters. That's all the "process" use I know of - unless janitor mop sinks would be considered "process". While I expect the annual water use for these would be really small, I have wondered if USGBC views mop sinks as "process". I don't find mop sinks in the WEp1/WEc2 template, so I assume theses would, thus, be seen as "process". Do you and others agree?
The WEp1/WEc2 templates do include "kitchen sinks". So, now, when I send in sub-metered dom hot water and sub-metered dom cold water for this commercial kitchen, and submit both as "process", will USGBC come back and say "aren't there kitchen sinks in your kitchen?" and try to make me break those out? Most of the sinks in this commercial kitchen are scullery sinks and rinse off sinks, but, as with any commercial kitchen, there are two hand-wash lavatories. Do you feel USGBC would question this idea of sub-metering and submitting all of this commercial kitchen water as "process"?