Dear all,

We are working on a New construction project for LEED Certification. The project has equipment rooms in around 50% of the spaces. The equipment load in the building is around 450KW. The rest of the spaces is office areas. The building central plant, facade and lighting is better than ASHRAE 90.1 prescriptions. However, the equipment rooms are served by Constant Air volume systems. Going by the requirements of ASHRAE 90.1,if the equipment rooms are modelled with Packaged single zone system, then the unmet hours is very high. Also we are not getting considerable savings also. The tower and pumps energy consumption is very high in proposed case.

The project is not meeting the mandatory requirement of 10% also.

I could dig into a CIR for ASHRAE 90.1 2004 which exempts the equipment rooms from complying to ASHRAE 90.1 requirements. It clearly says that HVAC for equipment rooms can be considered same in base and proposed case. I have attached the relevant CIR for reference.

Can this be used and benefit be taken?

Regards,
Rathnashree