Our area of work includes portions of the first and second floors of a university library in California. On the first floor, only bathrooms are included. On the second floor, the following space types are included: bathrooms, lobby, circulation, other visitor areas, and some staff-only area.
A few fixtures might be replaced. However, most will either not be touched or be slightly relocated to satisfy ADA requirements.
For the prerequisite, shall we include the existing fixtures in our area of work that are not replaced?
For the credit, which bathrooms do we include? Shall we only include second floor bathrooms that serve the lobby, circulation, visitor, and staff areas that are within our area of work?
emily reese moody
Sustainability Director, Certifications & ComplianceJacobs
LEEDuser Expert
454 thumbs up
October 16, 2019 - 12:10 am
Hi Bo,
So, here's how the prereq and credit work for CI:
For the prereq, you are allowed to include only fixtures that are in your scope of work, i.e. you're installing. In this case, I would not include existing if you're not touching them. Relocation is tricky...can't say I've ever had that before. You may want to ask LEED Coach to be certain there. This method allows you to meet the prerequisite using only those items in the scope.
Here's the catch: If you go this route, you are not eligible to pursue any points under the credit.
Alternatively, if you want to pursue points under the credit, you must include all fixtures in the building that are used by your occupants/visitors, including existing, whether they're inside or outside of your project boundary. For some projects that may have been more recently renovated (or esp if your project is moving into a new building), this is not necessarily a bad thing. As long as the rates are lower than the baseline, you could potentially still have enough savings to meet the prereq and credit criteria for points. For other projects moving into older buildings or ones that have not been recently updated, projects may be forced to abandon the credit if the fixtures' flow rates are too high.
Make sense?
Bo White
Senior Project EngineerNegaWatt Consulting
5 thumbs up
October 16, 2019 - 7:43 pm
Thanks, Emily. After I posted my question here, I also asked GBCI and received a response per below. We plan to exclude the first floor and only include the second floor. The library is 8 floors.
My question:
"We have a potential LEED ID+C: Commercial Interiors v4 project with an area of work that includes portions of the first and second floors of a university library in California. On the first floor, only bathrooms are included. On the second floor, the following space types are included: bathrooms, lobby, circulation, other visitor areas, and some staff-only area. For the bathrooms, the scope is limited to moving a few existing fixtures to ADA-required heights.
May we fully exclude the first floor from our LEED project boundary since the scope there is minimal and unrelated to the second floor work?
For the Indoor Water Use Reduction prerequisite, may we completely exclude the bathrooms on the first floor since no fixtures are being replaced?"
GBCI answer:
"Thank you for contacting GBCI regarding the scope of this project and treatment of plumbing fixtures.
The LEED project scope can be limited to only the 2nd floor as long as materials and construction waste can be separated from that of the non-certifying area. In that case, any fixtures there are not part of the LEED project.
I'll point out that for WEp, only new fixtures have to be WaterSense labeled, but all fixtures must be included in the required calculations."