Hello Marcus.
We have a project that will be applying for LEED certification under CI. The project is located on 4th floor within an office building with 5-floors. The building is served by a common HVAC system (air cooled chillers, and pumps), everything else will be in the design as part of the tenant development (interior HVAC, lighting etc).
For the Proposed Design the simulation strategy is to simulated only the CI portion of the building by spliting the Chiller capacity for the CI project area. COP wil be simulated with chiller nominal value. Other systems such as pumps will be sized for the CI load.
For the Budget design the simulation will be based on ASHRAE chapter 11 for the CI portion of the building as well.
Do you think this approach is valid for the GBCI reviewers?
Any advise would be appreciated.
Thanks
Marcus Sheffer
LEED Fellow7group / Energy Opportunities
LEEDuser Expert
5868 thumbs up
December 31, 2013 - 11:38 am
As I have said before we did something similar for an NC project many years ago and our methodology was acceptable then (here is the CIR - ID#5496, 11/02/2004). However, the ID+C Reference Guide is pretty clear that you need to model the whole building if it has a central plant. I would still advocate that there is a way to account for this without having to model the whole building but I am not sure if the reviewers would agree. If you want a definitive answer you should submit a LEED Interpretation (might want to check the existing ones first). If you decide to go ahead make sure you thoroughly explain your methodology and provide any calculations used to proportion the loads, etc. to the reviewer.