When running an analysis related to the indoor environmental quality it is crucial to categorize all spaces as either occupied or unoccupied.
Occupied rooms/spaces - are enclosed spaces intended for human activities and occupied for long periods of time.
Unoccupied rooms/spaces - are places intended primarily for other purposes; they are occupied only occasionally and for short periods of time—in other words, they are inactive areas. Examples include mechanical and electrical rooms, closets in a residence, egress stairways, data center floor areas, inactive storage areas in a warehouse or distribution centers, etc.
Why do we have space categorization?
Indoor environmental quality (EQ) features are designed to focus on the interaction between the occupants of the building and the indoor spaces in which they spend their time. This allows for key concerns surrounding the health and comfort of building occupants to be considered especially in the spaces they spend their most time occupying. For this reason, it is important to identify which spaces are used by the occupants, including any visitors (transients), and what activities they perform in each space. In building performance analysis, spaces should be treated differently depending on the space categorization.
With the introduction of the occupied vs unoccupied feature in drawing.tool, it's possible to categorize spaces according to the analysis you are trying to run. You can read more about them in the LEED Standards and ASHRAE 62.
Step-by-step workflow for assigning rooms
Follow these simple steps to do the same.
Export your building through a plugin(Revit, Rhino, Sketchup), once you get the "Export successful" message in your plugin, go to the cove.tool web application and you will be able to view your exported geometry within covetool in the "Geometry" section. You can use the "Detect Plugin Upload" button or refresh the page if the geometry doesn't show in the page.
Once the geometry is loaded in covetool, you can use the "Room Assignment" icon button on the left to open up the Room Assignment helper section. You will also notice that the geometry preview, now shows the room visualization for all the rooms you exported from Revit.
As you select the rooms in your geometry, you will now see their relevant information on the "Rooms" and "Selected Rooms" panels in the Room Assignment tab.
You can then use the "Set as Occupied" and "Set as Unoccupied" buttons right under the "Rooms" dropdown panel to assign occupied and unoccupied rooms in your geometry.
Finally, once all the rooms have been assigned, you can simply go to the 3D Analysis Page, and now you can also generate a LEED Report that will provide room-by-room results in an Excel sheet.
LEED Automated Report Details
The automated Excel report contains the necessary details required for the Daylight & Quality Views LEED credit submission.
For Daylight, it contains the regularly occupied spaces per level and the sDA and ASE percentage values that can be directly used for LEED Daylight and Quality Views spreadsheet. Here's a sample:
For Quality Views, it contains total quality views, type 1-90° sight lines, type 2-sky & context, and type 3-unobstructed view (%). Here's a sample:
This approach saves time over the manual method of calculating the sDA and ASE % by leveraging automation that is implemented in drawing.tool.
FAQs
What's the difference between Regularly versus non-regularly occupied spaces?
Occupied spaces are further classified as regularly occupied or non-regularly occupied, based on the duration of the occupancy. Regularly occupied spaces are areas where people normally spend more than one hour of continuous occupancy per person per day, on average in space. For spaces that are not used daily, the classification should be based on the time a typical occupant spends in the space when it is in use. Occupied spaces that do not meet the definition of regularly occupied are non-regularly occupied; these are areas that people pass through or areas used an average of less than one hour per person per day.
What are some Tricky Spaces when determining whether a space is occupied or unoccupied?
The following room types will be classified as follows based on their specific analyses.
Auditoriums - Exceptions to Daylight and Quality Views are permitted.
Gymnasiums - Exceptions to Quality Views are permitted.
Why am I not able to create LEED reports?
LEED reports can only be generated when the rooms are assigned within the covetool geometry page. You will need to follow the steps in this article to assign occupied and unoccupied spaces in your building in order to unlock the "Create LEED Report" button.