This weekend I was out of town and stayed in a New England hotel that happens to be a LEED Platinum certified building (version unknown). The stay was very nice and the staff was more than pleasant. However, there were a couple of items that were a little bothersome for a Platinum certified building.
First, while many of the light bulbs in the lamps and sconce fixtures were compact fluorescent, there were two fixtures in the bathroom with incandescent bulbs. Maybe they were originally CF bulbs but were replaced with the incandescent-type bulb or maybe the selected fixture couldn’t fit a CF bulb. Either way, when specifying fixtures for new construction or retrofits, a fixture type with a bulb fitting that is not compatible a less efficient incandescent bulb should be considered. This will help maintain the efficiencies of the design throughout the life of the building.
Also, I noticed that the room conditioning unit was a vertically stacked heat pump. It was built into a corner on the exterior wall and had one register facing the room (perpendicular to the window) and another facing across the window (parallel to the window). This seems like a decent design to me. The return air grille was also the access door to the unit. I opened the door to see the specs and I was surprised to see that the heat pump was charged with R22 refrigerant. I thought, how could this be? Either a more expensive, lower global warming potential (GWP) unit was value engineered out of the design or someone wasn’t doing their due diligence during the construction/commissioning phase of the project. This could have been caught during a submittal review, during construction walkthroughs by the commissioning agent or mechanical engineer or during functional testing.
Attention to detail is extremely important during all phases of a design project. Another important responsibility of the project managers is to educate the project team on the sustainable design features of a project and why they are important to the owner and good for the environment. These conversations should not be limited to the design team and owners/operators. They should be carried through to the contract documents/bidding phase and reviewed with all of the bidding contractors. This increases the potential for these sustainable design practices to be carried on to future projects an minimizes the chance to VE these items out of the design without thinking twice before it’s done.
Building commissioning and operations management training is definitely big in the process of LEED as you have pointed out. It’s funny how much information can be lose or changed from the start of talks with clients to day the building opens to the public. Things should be different in a few years when all parties become accustomed to the LEED process.
That’s a fine example of the faultiness of LEED certification. I really like the concept and I’m all for benefits for sustainable projects, but there are changes which need to be made to the whole LEED certification process.
You’ll agree that LEED certification process needs to be stricter, since I’ve seen so many projects with loop holes that got Platinum certification while achieving far less than some LEED gold certified projects.