Hello,
I am working on trying to obtain the indoor environmental quality-thermal comfort credit for a new construction. The building contains new open-office workstations. The credit states to provide individual thermal comfort controls for at least 50% of individual occupant spaces and that the thermal comfort controls shall allow occupants to adjust at least one of the following in their local environment: air temperature, radiant temperature, air speed & humidity.
Each open-office contains about 20 workstations. It's impossible to provide individual thermal comfort controls for at least 10 workstations, due to the HVAC system (1 fan coil for 4 workstations). Can I justify that this type of space is considered as shared multi-occupant space?
Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Kristina Bach
VP of InnovationSustainable Investment Group
151 thumbs up
October 26, 2016 - 1:13 pm
No - open office areas are consistently considered to be individual workstations for this credit. It's important to note that the 50% threshold is based on your total quantity of individual workstations (i.e. total private offices + total open workstations), not based on each room individually. Therefore you might be able to still achieve the credit if you have a large number of private offices in the building with controls to balance out the occupants in the open office area (for example, if you have 60 private offices + 40 open workstations and if all of the private offices had the appropriate controls, you would meet that portion of the credit as your percentage with controls is 60%).