Sustainable Facilities Tool General Services Administration

The occupant has a great impact on HVAC-related energy use. Individual controls help ensure comfort for those in the building. Occupants without t...

Incorporating task lights into the overall lighting strategy allows occupants to customize their ambient light conditions on a personalized basis. T...

Provide occupants with ways to make meaningful changes to their lighting environments through personalization of task lighting and manual overrides ...

Perform periodic maintenance of control systems to ensure optimized performance to avoid unwanted behavior by occupants to bypass the system.

Perform periodic maintenance of control systems to ensure optimized performance to avoid unwanted behavior by occupants to bypass the system.

Limit the use of accent lighting. Couple necessary accent lighting applications with lighting controls to ensure highlighted objects are illuminated...

Facilitate the transition from a passive occupant to an active participant through training and incentives. Where appropriate, account for passive ...

Finding: $3.4 billion annual economic benefit, with $0.4 billion implementation costs, through integration of thermal occupant controls.Scope: Lawre...

Modern office policies and technologies enable mobility as a means for the occupant to seek out desirable environmental conditions. Mobile laptops a...

The lighting engineer is responsible for ensuring that all lighting regulations are met, interior and exterior spaces are sufficiently and elegantly...

Creating a sustainable and well-functioning lighting strategy by integrating efficient lighting technologies, controls, and space layout has been sh...

Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design for Operations & Maintenance: Existing Buildings (LEED O+M: EB) addresses lighting systems through...

Limiting light trespass and resulting sky-glow from inefficient outdoor lighting is addressed in LEED, among other lighting-specific categories. Red...

Green Globes certification for NC projects directly necessitates a sustainable lighting strategy in the categories of Site, Energy, and Indoor Envir...

Human behavior and interaction with the building space plays a critical component in achieving holistic sustainability. Desired gains in energy effi...

Providing high quality thermal and ventilation comfort as part of Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) in commercial offices is a high priority for fe...

LEED for Interior Design & Construction (ID+C): Commercial Interiors is intended for certification of spaces smaller than the whole building. Ev...

The resource impacted greatest from indoor environmental quality is not energy, water, or physical materials themselves; it’s the occupants th...

Providing thermal comfort controllability can be achieved in a number of ways. Individual controls, such as thermostats, local diffusers, variable v...

By establishing green cleaning contracts and purchasing agreements that specify environmentally-friendly cleaning and office materials, the facility...

Occupant comfort can be optimized by providing high levels of individual or group controllability with regard to ambient air, lighting, and sound. T...

Providing daylight access and views for occupants is important in reaching performance goals as part of the IEQ strategy. According to a study done ...

Large windows can provide daylight to interior spaces, but the daylight can be best used when complementary technologies are employed. Lighting cont...

Thermal conditions, which include air temperature, relative humidity, and velocity, greatly impact overall occupant comfort and associated productiv...

The lighting engineer, in cooperation with the rest of the integrative team, should ensure as much natural daylight permeates the space as possible....

Interior space not only impacts materials and resource use, but also is critical to human performance through safe and healthy interiors that promo...

Occupant behavior plays a critical role in achieving the designed energy efficiency of lighting systems. Energy modeling accuracies can often vary b...

The term "biophilia", meaning love of nature, is increasingly being used in high-performance building design. The goal of biomimicry is to recreate ...

Submetering systems help to improve resource efficiency and conservation practices in a building, which can be used to improve indoor environmental ...

Americans spend approximately 90 percent of their time indoors1 and as a result their comfort, health, and work performance rely heavily on indoor e...

Moisture can enter the office building in a number of ways, including leaks in the building envelope and plumbing systems or excessive moisture in t...

Upgrade buildings to meet ASHRAE Standard 55 and either 62.1 or 62.2 Recommended actions include moisture control policies, maximized daylighting...

Lighting Ecosystem Lighting in the workplace can be better understood as an ecosystem that includes lighting design as just one component of a netw...

By consuming 17% of the building’s total electricity consumption and further influencing overall energy demand by the waste heat it emits, lig...

A lighting upgrade can cut energy bills, improve the look of a facility, and boost employee morale, but all those benefits can fade away if the new ...