The new LEED Interpretation #10248 (dated 10/1/12) requires residential kitchens to be exhausted to the outdoors, regardless of whether the kitchen includes electric or gas cooking appliances. This is a significant change to the way LEED apartments are going to be designed, since under previous versions of LEED, recirculating kitchen hoods were acceptable to meet the kitchen exhaust requirements of ASHRAE 62.1 for IEQp1. Now new apartment projects registered after 10/1/12 will be required to include kitchen exhaust, which can add significant cost to a project. Today an engineer said to me “but the last LEED 2009 apartment we did wasn’t required to have kitchen exhaust…” and the engineer was correct. Indeed we submitted a project-specific CIR back in 2011 for this same issue and received confirmation from GBCI that recirculating kitchen hoods were acceptable. It appears this is another example of the LEED Interpretation process requiring two similar projects certified under the same rating system to follow a significantly different set of rules. Has anyone else run into this issue on a LEED 2009 project?
LEEDuser Basic Member
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