Case 1, Option 2 states that at a minimum, the smoking room must be directly exhausted to the outdoors, away from air intakes and building entry paths, with no recirculation of ETS-containing air to nonsmoking areas. However, there is no similar requirements under Case 2, which doesn't seem right. What good is the weather stripping, penetration sealing, and blower door testing if there's no requirement to isolate the ventilation system and protect the non-smoking spaces from smoke coming from the air returns in the smoking rooms? What am I missing?
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Tristan Roberts
RepresentativeVermont House of Representatives
LEEDuser Expert
11477 thumbs up
September 22, 2010 - 12:16 am
I hadn't thought about it from this perspective, but now that I do, I agree with you that something obvious is going unstated.It does seem like the point is fairly academic, though—IF you're right and there's no isolation requirement, who would do that?
Rick Gehrke
ConsultantA.C.E. AmBiental
37 thumbs up
September 22, 2010 - 10:40 am
Hopefully nobody would actually do that, but a barracks lawyer might use that omission to make a case for cheaper HVAC in a residential building. The implementation section doesn't seem to differentiate between residential and non-residential projects, so I'm thinking it was either an oversight in the requirements section, or left "flexible" on purpose. Some situations won't meet the intent even if they meet the letter anyway. Take a hotel, for example, where rooms on the second floor are designated smoking, and rooms on the third floor are not. The rooms in my example (typical worker bee hotel) each have their own PTAC which pulls in and exhausts air. The second and third floor units are within less than 25 feet of each other, so someone can effectively smoke within 25 feet of an air intake. While the smoke is being exhausted to the outside, in accordance with the requirements of case 1, option 2, it can be pulled right back in. There's no requirement to exhaust the smoke anywhere in particular, the requirement just says "to the outdoors". Since the people smoking are inside the building, the restriction on exterior smoking areas being at least 25 feet away from entries, outdoor air intakes, and operable windows doesn't provide any protection.
Martin Dettling
Senior Vice PresidentAlbanese Development Corp.
3 thumbs up
May 4, 2011 - 2:36 pm
Residential buildings typically do not have return air systems that are shared between separate living units.
Susann Geithner
PrincipalEmerald Built Environments
1297 thumbs up
May 5, 2011 - 1:08 pm
We have talked this through for a project including a hotel with a central air conditioning system. The advise we got from the GBCI is to also have these systems separate from "non-smoking" systems. But also we have a mixed use building with hotel, office, retail. So we are required to do that overall for the building.