LEED Interpretation: Effective Date

GBCI reviewers should only make projects accountable to LIs and addenda published at the time your project was registered, not after.

Yep, it's published . . . http://www.usgbc.org/leed/tools/interpretations

"Project teams must follow rating system addenda based on their project’s registration date."
and . . .
"All project teams are required to adhere to all LEED Interpretations posted before their registration date. This also applies to other addenda. Adherence to rulings posted after a project registers is optional, but strongly encouraged."

Pat,

Also the LEED Certification Policy Manual, For Use With All LEED Rating Systems published January 1, 2012 states this in section 6.2:

" GBCI requires compliance with the version of the reference guide including all published addenda, that was in place at the time of the project registration. Project teams may voluntarily elect to pursue certification by demonstrating compliance with a revised version of the reference guide rather than the version that existed at the time such a project was registered."

For some reason the link isn't working but if you email me I can send you the document: eduran@dagherengineering.com

I have to say that many of those frustrating comments seem to be "canned responses" meaning they just put them there from the get go to give you some sort of grief during the first design review. Its a pain point for sure.

I have certified a lot of high level LEED projects, meaning I am the person who has responed to the review comments. This is what I have learned:

- RG revisions and addenda up to the registration date can be overridden by the person doing the review.

This is not right, of course. How is this allowed? Well, if the reviewer makes an error, or decides to give you a hard time, the review comment stands as written. You must respond to the comment regardless of whether the reviewer properly followed the rules or not. I have been forced to comply with a change to LEED that occurred as late as after the project was under construction.

Here is another observation:

- Claiming an ECM (Exceptional Cost Measure) for EAc1 can completely undo a project's certification process.

The above happened to a project of mine where the energy savings for a highly-specialized process load (aquatic life support for medical treatment and isolation) where challenged by some "unidentified" expert who was evidently hired by the LEED reviewer (the GBCI used an outside reviewer firm) to conduct a "special" review.

The special review challenged things such as the working schedule. The schedule was identical in both energy use cases, so the argument was about proving when the process loads were actually used during a year. In other words, we were forced to "accurately" predict unknown future illnesses of different aquatic species, and to backup the proper water temperatures of the medical life support tanks.

The real undoing of the life support challenged project was a demand to have other engineers of similar systems, that were designed locally, provide letters stating what the standard non-energy efficient design was. It made no difference to the GBCI that there are only two qualified firms in the U.S. who can design such a system for large aquariums.

It is essentially impossible, for liability reasons, to get another engineer to provide a letter stating their design is not "that good," and the owner will have to spend more money on energy. It is unreasonable to get a letter from your only direct competitor, especially when the two companies are challenging each other, for marketing reasons, of using as many energy saving techniques as they can fit into a project.