EAp2 and EAc1 Reviews and Appeals

YES!! We are growing increasingly frustrated with the reviews lately, and not just the energy model. We have had a number of credits denied on technicallities that could have easily been cleared up with a minimal attempt at mid-review contact. I have never once had a reviewer use the mid-review contact tab for a 2009 project, which is strange considering the 2009 interface has a specific option for this purpose. It is very frustrating for the design teams and owners who exert a considerable amount of time and money to implement a certain strategy only to have it denied by a reviewer based on a technicallity.

I don't really know what the solution should be, but I have started submitting every one of these problems to GBCI so that they can have a better understanding of the scope of this problem. I just feel like some of these reviewers are incapable of stepping back, looking at the big picture, and determining if the project is fulfulling the intent of the credit. I totally get the need for rigorous standards and all, but I feel like this has turned into a game of "gotcha".

I have had the pleasure to work with the reviewer more directly on a very big project and I totally agree that using mid review clarifications or even being able to clarify a couple of things upfront is a very useful way to eliminated problems and frustration on both sides.
I know the reviewer are experiencing a higher work load now for a while and they have hired more people and took more reviews in house to improve time and service. That also meant that the reviewer now has a list of items, which they have to go through and a standard comment for certain issues.
My guess is that this might have let some people to just look at the checklist. that would explain them asking for documents on minor items even if you would get the credit without "the recycled content of that chair". Maybe another point on that checklist, which says, "would the exclusion of this chair result not achieving the MR 4 credit', would help!? A kinds of a feasibility-without-additional-document-check"

Also as for EA P2/c1 my experience, having worked on pretty sophisticated project and more standard buildings, is that ASHRAE 901.-2007 just wasn't design to be for, what LEED is using it for. I understand the need for a standard and guidelines, but the more and more complex and non-standard systems, which you typically find in LEED buildings, is making it really hard to use ASHREA. I have being told from the reviewer to submit CIRs for all the special situations for EA p2/c1, but honestly I don't think this is going to work and will be really time consuming. I think I speak for most engineers and designer when I say that we don't want to find a way to get around the requirements and lower the standard, we just want to know what the standard is and if we are going to get through the review with a certain approach. I think it would be extremely helpful for the project teams to have another step in the review of the EA p2/c1 credit to not get ahead to far just to find out you are wrong.
Maybe submitting table 1.4 prior to everything, to check you input values and approach.
An advice I got from the reviewer and also found true in many reviews. Less is more. Reduce the uploads to not more than required. The reviewer have to read everything you submit. I tend to over do it sometimes and my colleague only submits the bare minimum and his reviews were always done much quicker than mine.

Susann, you mentioned a list of items that the reviewers use. Do you know if this list is available for us to use as guidance?

We used to follow the less is more strategy but with this new version, this does not seem to work for us anymore. We are getting comments that aren't even addressed in the LEED guide, the credit templates and referenced standards. We are also getting comments on multiple projects that ask us to submit missing items that were not really missing, the reviewer just did not look through the documents. All of these items add up and cost us more time than budgeted. I hope this is something they will be working to change.

There are the tips from the GBCI (see comment above). However what I was referring to is different and not available to us. We have found that we get the exact some comments on several projects, when we hit a certain mark. Sometime they are more like standard comments, which could apply to any project. For instance if your u-value of your glazing is really good, you will always get a comment like "Please confirm that u-values reflect the window assembly not the middle of the glass value." OR if you have a very high recycling quote for MR c2, you will get a comment asking you to provide quiet a few more documents, which aren't required from the get-go. We have also had the experience that "the target keeps moving" in the sense of having to make assumptions what the reviewer may or may not want to see despite what's on the LEED online form.
When submitting we try to make sure that each document or calculation has it's own file and the file name is very clearly stating what's in there. Also we always zip the files, so nothing can get lost since we only have very few files to upload.
I very much understand your frustration. I have been there too and it's still happening on our teams, but it has gotten a lot better within the last two years.