Advice provided by: Sarah Gudeman, LEED AP, EIT, Morrissey Engineering, Inc.

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Morrissa asks:

Hi, we are an engineering firm and have recently learned that a building we are designing is going LEED. We have registered our project and have been assigned certain credits. What is our next step in completing the design and specifications for the project?

Green-Buildings Answer:

Morrissa, I assume that your firm is not heading up the LEED effort and that you have a LEED consultant on board that is familiar with the process. Your consultant will have experience in various types of LEED certified projects and will be able to help guide you and the rest of the design and construction teams through the process.

At my firm, we like to have an initial LEED charette meeting at the beginning of design to ensure that everyone understands what credits need to be incorporated into their design and who is responsible (oftentimes participation is needed from multiple team members to complete the requirements of a specific credit.) An example is EAc5, Indoor Pollutant Source control, where the mechanical engineer must specify the correct filters, and exhaust areas as required while the architect must design entryway systems to comply with the credit.

The most important thing is to make sure that the LEED design principles that were assigned to you are incorporated into your design documents and specifications. There are obviously many ways to ensure credit compliance and several ways of documenting credits. Several sites out there are gracious enough to provide sample documentation, including the following:

* LEED-EB v2.0 (Silver) – UC Office of the President, a 12-story office building located in Oakland, CA. http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/sustainability/leed.html

* LEED-NC v2.2 (Platinum) – Alameda County Waste Management (1537 Webster Street), a renovation in Oakland, CA. http://www.stopwaste.org/home/index.asp?page=926

* And the Harvard Office for Sustainability (formerly Harvard’s Green Building Resource) is currently tracking all their LEED registered and certified projects online at http://www.greencampus.harvard.edu/theresource/. There are currently over 10 sets of full documentation examples for LEED-NC and 7 completed LEED-CI projects.

To ensure that your green building strategies are clear and concise in your specifications, currently, several MasterSpec sections are targeted to LEED certification:

A book that would prove a valuable resource for your firm (in addition to the LEED reference guide in question, of course) is Arcom’s Specifying LEED Requirements (available online at http://www.arcomnet.com/users/book_cd.php).

Good luck!
Sarah Gudeman, LEED AP