shopping mall

Adam, unfortunately this is an area with unclear requirements. See this excellent discussion thread for some background on similar issues, but no clear resolution.

Hi Adam, your question is very similar to Victor's "bus bay areas" question. The intent of the credit is to give occupants greater control of their thermal comfort. I do think that you need to provide individual controls for the cashiers. Please see my comment on "bus bay areas" for the rationale and possible design solution.

John, and Adam. I agree that the intent of the credit is to provide controllability for occupants. I think we would all agree with that bit. However, I think it gets much less clear once you move beyond that basic understanding and get into implementing the details. In the case of a shopping mall, I would take a look at the LEED for Retail requirements for Controllability of Systems. For more information, go here: http://www.usgbc.org/ShowFile.aspx?DocumentID=7956 (page 67). I have provided controls to cashiers before for a coffee shop I worked on, I also provide task lights for visitors to read books, or do whatever tasks they were doing when visiting the café. I think it gets muddied when you think about the visitors to a space. In a mall environment, in my view, it’s not practical to really provide controls to all occupants. As Tristan mentioned, here is a good summary of some of the conflicting cases: http://www.leeduser.com/credit/NC-2009/IEQc6.1?page=0#comment-31034 • On October 17, Larissa Oaks with the GBCI advised a LEEDuser to consider an auditorium as a shared multi-occupant space where the theater staff has access to controls but not necessarily the audience. This guidance suggests that it is only staff that should be considered and not visitors. • Issued last summer, the IEQ Space Matrix states that regularly and non-regularly occupied spaces should be included within the calculation • CIR 5071 seems to state that you should include both visitors and staff when doing the calculation, but that you should mostly look to include spaces that are regularly occupied and not worry as much about the non-regularly occupied spaces. • Unfortunately, these items do not provide clear guidance to project teams. My feeling is that the intent of the credit is to encourage the appropriate amount of controllability for users. If you can step back from the LEED work a bit and imagine that someone might very well benefit from having individual controls because they are doing an individual task that would benefit from their own controls then it would help to meet the intent of the credit to provide controls for that person. Personally, I think that’s much easier to do for lighting than for thermal comfort but that’s not always the case. For instance, operable windows go a long way to provide occupants with a chance to change their thermal comfort. Operable windows don’t work everywhere and are rarely seen in malls, save for a few specific climates that allow for it.