Rounding up or down?

If you're looking at preferred parking (SSc4.3) for and you determine that your project needs 4.15 LEV parking spaces, how many should you provide, 4 or 5? While this is a relatively harmless difference (one more sign probably won't break the bank), the difference between 1 or 2 showers (SSc4.2) might be more of an issue in an small office building.
I wasn't sure about this answer until I noticed that the credit templates solved the answer for me. One tenth of a shower is a full shower, and rounding up, even when the numbers would typically be rounded down is the norm.
Take the following example:
5% of 180 FTE is 9.00000 secure bicycle storage spaces require. If we add one more FTE, then 5% of 181 is 9.05, which in most minds would round down to 9. In this case however, the LEED credit calculator rounds the number up to 10 required spaces:

3 comments:

Sally said...

Oh man. This shit totally gets me off.

Kelly said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Kelly said...

I'm working on a LEED-CS v2.0 project and when I type in the FTE information in the SSc4.2 Alternative Transportation: Bicycle Storage & Changing Rooms - Option 2, I get all sorts of wonkiness.

I have a 320,000 SF building with a total FTE of 1482. This breaks down into 1389 being allocated to the first 300,000 SF and 93 being allocated to the remaining 20,000SF. When I do the calcs I get 7.4 showers and 42.14 Bike storage spaces. Using the rounding up rule of LEED presented in this post, I would assume the template would have spit out 8 showers and 43 bike storage spaces. Instead it spit out - 7 showers and 45 bike storage spaces!!!! It is enough to make you think you are going crazy.

If anyone re-runs this calc and finds that I am making (most likely an excel error). Please let me know!

thanks!