We are renovating and entire floor (43,000 office space square feet). We are replacing the lavs to .09 gallons per cycle and possibly replacing the urinals to .5 gpf or waterless, not sure about the water closets yet. My question is this, we are installing one new kitchenette sink, if we install a 1.8 gpm faucet (.45 gallon per cycle), can we take full credit for this? In other words, 300 FTE times the savings of only one kitchen sink has almost as much impact as replacing all 10 water closets with 1.28 gallon per flush? I did not read it anywhere but am I supposed to take diversity with the kitchen sink? and if not, how low can I go with the Kitchen sink flow rate? 0.5 gpm? I just want to be 100% sure before I report to the team, seems too good to be true. thx.
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Erik Ruoff
PrincipalThe Green Engineer, Inc
36 thumbs up
March 18, 2011 - 1:38 pm
Hi Jay –
It is my understanding that - yes - you can take full credit for the kitchenette sink if all 300 FTEs have access to the fixture. The calculator in the template will use a default fixture use of (1) 15 second use per day for each office FTE.
If for some reason the fixture will only be used by a certain population of office users (e.g. executive suite) then you will have to create a separate Fixture Group.
I think you’ll find that changing the WC will still have a larger impact then the kitchenette faucet based on overall annual kGals, but every bit of savings certainly helps! We have seen projects use a 0.5gpm kitchen faucet with success. A bunch of manufacturers offer 0.5gpm restrictors as options. I hope this helps.