My projects can follow the Ventilation Rate Procedure in ASHRAE 62.1-2007, sections 4 through 7 without bigegr problems. The only thing that is difficult is that we have garages under the buildings that have a lower exhaust rate than stated in ASHRAE. In the garages we always have CO and CO2 monitors. There is no way that a project of mine would increase exhaust rates to the rates stated in ASHRAE as these are not motivated in our country and since this would mean low energy efficiency, which is an important issue in a cold country. We would like to say that we follow the Ventilation Rate Procedure in all cases of the building except for in the garages, where we would like to follow some form of Indoor Air Quality procedure instead. Is this possible? Would it comply if we have monitors in the garage?
Our local code is more stringent when it comes to outside air rate (100 %) so the other option is to just follow the local code, including the garage rates. Local code does of course take into account number of movements in the garage, number of parking spaces, average driving distance in the garage, probability of congestion and so on when determining ventilation rates. The limit for CO is 50 ppm when ventilation rates have to be increased.
The intent of the credit is to have a good air quality in the building, for the occupants well-being!
Please give me opinions and feedback since this has caused a headache for a long time now.
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John Drigot
Design/LEED SpecialistThe Neenan Company
185 thumbs up
January 4, 2012 - 1:51 pm
Maria,
Follow this link for more information on this subject - http://www.leeduser.com/topic/leed-certifications-parking-garages-no-lon...
Maria Porter
Sustainability specialistSkanska Sweden
268 thumbs up
January 13, 2012 - 4:56 am
John,
Sorry I don’t think this helps. Many of my office buildings have underground garages and I cannot exclude these from the LEED project, they are part of the office building. So the problem remains.
In October a new set of ACP:s were launched for international projects: https://www.usgbc.org/ShowFile.aspx?DocumentID=10335 This could be something for us and option 1 of IEQp1 states that we can use CEN standards. The problem here is, that although the standards have a status of a Swedish standard, that in its own is not enough. We have to show calculations like everyone else.
These standards have a few room types shown, but not as many as ASHRAE. And for garages there is a formula for “other known emissions” that is supposed to be used for CO. The problem here is that they don’t state what the limit of CO exposure is. Different sources say different. For example 35 ppm for long time exposure and 100 ppm for short time exposure. Second problem, they don’t say what formula to be used when calculating CO emission rates from cars. The only one I can find in other places, and Swedish recommendations, is from the 80-ies and not relevant any more. So showing compliance with CEN Standards is hard, there are no actual values to follow. Anyone had experience of CEN Standards and LEED?
Agnieszka Rylska
GO4IT SP Z OO SP K29 thumbs up
February 1, 2019 - 8:43 am
Maria,
Were you able to find an alternative compliance path for underground garages ventilation which allows for lower exhaust rates?