Hi all, I asked this earlier, and I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but my team is pretty confused about the situation. Any advice that anyone has would be greatly appreciated.
We have a shopping center interested in certification with 10 buildings. Only 3 buildings will have restroom facilities for the retail customers that is meant to serve the entire project (and is approved as meeting code as such). We are not sure how to do the WEp1 calculation.
Our original thought is to do a water calculation according to the water use of the retail customers in each building even if the building does not have the restroom facilities. For example, Building A does not have restrooms, but we will still include a water reduction calculation base on the 114 transients using the restroom facilities in Building B. And Building B will only count the water usage of its transients and not the transients of any other building.
Is this an acceptable approach?
Thanks in advance.
Michael Smithing
Director - Green Building AdvisoryColliers International Ltd.
304 thumbs up
May 20, 2015 - 12:29 am
There is no MPR which requires toilets to be installed in a building, thus if no fixtures are installed you will not have compliance issues with WEp1. From your question, it is not clear whether the buildings actually have toilets installed for the use of FTE (but not customers).
LEED should (although some review teams may feel differently) want you to model use as close as possible to the actual use. This means that you would have a transient fixture group with the public toilet facilities in each building, and the number of users for the group would be the total expected users, which may or may not be the sum of retail customers at Building A and Building B. A shopping center with multiple buildings will likely have many customers visiting multiple buildings and the restrooms may actually be an "anchor" use for the project.
To be on the safe side, I would look at the impact of having transients use the FTE facilities - I'd want to make sure I met the WEp1 requirements either way to avoid surprises later.
Nate Steeber
Project Manager, SustainabilitySol design + consulting
23 thumbs up
May 27, 2015 - 11:03 am
Michael,
Thank you! The information is extremely helpful. The tenant space will have restrooms, but it is only accessible to the FTE, not to the transient visitors. Thus, we thought it was unrealistic to assume they would use those fixtures.
From your example, it sounds like you're saying Building A would meet the prerequisite, which I remember reading about in the Water Calculation Supplemental Information, but that it would not have the option of receiving points. Currently, we were calculating water use for that building based on the transients even though they are using a different buildings fixtures - it seems like you are saying this may not be kosher with USGBC and all use should be in building B. Am I understanding your interpretation correctly?
When you speak of an "anchor" do you mean that just that one building can claim the credit while others cannot? I do not quite understand.
Again, thank you for the information - this is quite helpful.
- Nate.
Eric Anderson
26 thumbs up
May 27, 2015 - 4:25 pm
In general, only the fixtures within the certifying building should be the basis for that building's WE calculations. Therefore, in the situation you described, Building A would not have any shoppers (i.e. Transients) in its WE calcs because there are no fixtures installed or anticipated for shoppers to use in that building, but the WE calcs for Building B would have to account for shoppers that might be coming from Building A to use the restrooms in Building B since fixtures will be provided there for shopper use.
However, there are additional considerations to address if the project is pursuing LEED-CS (such as whether/how to address anticipated, future fixtures in WE calcs), or the 'group approach' (such as the difference between calcs for the prerequisite and the credit), and so on. Therefore, if you have not already done so, I'd recommend you submit more detail about your project(s) via the Contact page of USGBC.org to request more specific feedback on this issue. Best of luck with your certification!