we are working on a hotel project where the residents will also use the water fixtures in common areas like restaurants. in that case what is the applicable baseline? it's true that fixtures in common areas should be taken as public but in the LEED online form when you select the fixture family as public it only takes the FTE in to account not the residents. should we manually change it leave it as it is?
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Susann Geithner
PrincipalEmerald Built Environments
1297 thumbs up
November 16, 2011 - 11:34 am
Here is what we did in our project. Hotel with restaurant and employee changing and wash rooms. The hotel guest are entered as residence and use private fixtures. The restaurant has a separate user group as visitors (people mostly not staying in the hotel but coming to the restaurant). This group uses public fixtures. We didn't deduct any hotel residence to account for overlap and over accounting. instead we under estimated the restaurant visitors a bit.
Also the hotel's employees are a separate user group with public fixtures. Keep in mind that they are working shifts. An easy way to count them is to get the total number of employees and assume them working 8 hours, 5 days a week. For WE P1 it really doesn't matter when they work and if there is overlap.
I hope that helps.
Michael Miller
Project Architect236 thumbs up
November 16, 2011 - 2:40 pm
Udana, see the November addenda, which included specific guidance on fixture groups for hotel projects. (Tristan quoted them above in a post on November 9.)
It's not clear from your question whether you're referring to a "traditional" hotel where the guests happen to also use the restaurant, or if you're dealing with some sort of "residential" hotel where the restaurant exists only/primarily to serve the residents. If it's a "normal" hotel setup with restaurant(s), then I would argue you do one fixture group for the residents in the guestrooms, and count expected restaurant uses in the public-area fixture group, regardless of whether the diner is a hotel guest or not. The guestroom fixture group already assumes that the guests spend part of their time outside the guestroom and thus presumably does not capture 100% of that person's 24-hour fixture usage; and a hotel guest eating in the restaurant is probably as likely to use the public-area restroom as a diner from off the street. So I don't see that there is any need to separate out hotel-guest diners from other diners, nor is it double-counting for them to be counted in both the guestroom and transients (diners) user groups.
Susann Geithner
PrincipalEmerald Built Environments
1297 thumbs up
November 16, 2011 - 3:33 pm
We see that a little different. A resident is assumed to have breakfast and dinner at his home. A hotel guest, at least in better hotels, usually eats at the hotels restaurant. In most cases one uses it's own bathroom and rarely the common restrooms in the hotel. That at least is my experience and my hotel client's. So we calculated the diner on the low end, because we do think it's double counting to some degree.