Dear All,

 
One of our clients is developing a project that includes two independent buildings (9 levels office tower and a small retail building) sharing a common enclosed carpark. This carpark is the only connection between both buildings.

The client intends to certify the office tower (LEED BD+C Core&Shell) but does not intend to certify the retail building.

Our proposal for the LEED Boundary includes:

  1. the office tower (obviously);
  2. site areas (paving and landscaped) around the office tower (but not including site areas around the retail building);
  3. a portion of the enclosed carpark, defined taking into account the number of parking places allocate to each building (please note that there is no physical separation inside the enclosed carpark).

The carpark will be endowed with some service taps that will rarely be used. These taps are fed by the common service water branches of the office building. To make the breakdown of water use between the portion inside the LEED Boundary and the portion outside would require a large number of meters.

We notice that there a LEED Interpretation for a similar case related with irrigation (ID# 10475 v4 BDC campus: WEp Building level water metering): “For compliance with LEED v4 WE prerequisite Building Level Water Metering, projects whose water use for irrigation is metered at the campus system level may submit an engineering calculation that accurately reflects the water consumption of the landscaped area within the project boundary, or prorate irrigation data for the project boundary from the campus meter. If the project chooses to prorate irrigation data from the campus meter in lieu of installing irrigation meter(s) to track landscape water consumption within the project boundary for WE prerequisite Building Level Water Metering, irrigation water systems are excluded from the list of water subsystems eligible for WE credit Water Metering.”

Can we apply the same interpretation to the enclosed carparks ? Please note that water use is almost irrelevant and much lower than irrigation and the risk of undetected water leaks is almost zero (which is not the case with the irrigation system).

Thanks in advance.