L eadership in Energy and Environmental Design, more commonly known as LEED, is a big deal nowadays. For anyone maybe only vaguely familiar with the term and the concept, a little background:

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Indoor Environmental Quality

1.2: IAQ Best Management Practices ? OA Delivery Monitoring
1.3: IAQ Best Management Practices ? Increased Ventilation
2.2: Occupant Comfort ? Occupant Controlled Lighting
2.3: Occupant Comfort ? Thermal Comfort Monitoring

Credit 1 (parts 2 and 3) addresses the need for outdoor air monitoring and control. Through the use of outside airflow measuring stations and proportionally controllable outside air dampers, we can attain these credits. Monitoring and control can be done with individual I/O via the BAS. In addition, there are certain manufacturers that endeavor to facilitate the task by incorporating both monitoring and control into one device, basically an outdoor air damper that has flow measuring and control capabilities built into one package.

Credit 2.2 is a lighting credit, and requires that the BAS interface with the lighting systems in some manner. Not all that difficult these days considering that, even though typically the BAS and lighting control systems are separate from each other, they?re both microprocessor-based, and can communicate with each other via standard communication protocols. That being the case, the BAS can certainly have an influence on achieving this credit. An example would be if an occupant entered a VAV zone, hit the override button on the zone sensor to put the VAV system into an occupied mode, and at the same time the lights for that zone came on?maybe not the best example, but at least you can see where we can go with this concept.

Finally we come to the end, credit 2.3 addresses the need to monitor the occupant spaces and log what the credit refers to as ?thermal comfort?. While that may be difficult to define, the BAS at least can measure temperatures within all controlled zones, and chart these temperatures over time in order to attain this credit. Of course one person?s definition of thermal comfort may be another person?s definition of ?sweltering? or ?freezing?, the objective element of the term can be monitored and logged via the BAS, thereby attaining the credit.

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