Charles A. Warsinske

Has anyone taken the LEED Green Associate exam? Please share your exam experience.

Katrina – Sorry I accidentally posted a question about the practice tests to your discussion earlier !!

Katrina,
If your program is LAAB accredited, then you should be fine. Email me priviately and I can make some recommendations for you to address the LATC staff.
Stephanie

Baskar – Could you go into more detail with your comments…

natural topography( wild grasses area or growing naturally ) can take as landscaped area? or it should be neatly landscaped ( dry or xeroxscping_) area? for site selection ?.

I also got this information from GBCI: If you area a LEED AP and you choose a specialty – there is no harm in keeping your enrollment and that if you do not report any continuing education hours at the end of the 2 years your LEED AP with Specialty credential will expire, however you will remain a LEED AP without specialty.

FYI: LEED Credentialing Maintenance Program (CMP) – read last sentence!!

Enrollment Options: LEED APs without specialty will be provided with an enrollment window, a 2-year period between fall 2009 and fall 2011. LEED APs without specialty can view their enrollment window through My Credentials at http://www.gbci.org. The last enrollment windows close…[Read more]

Its the pathogens. Greywater is almost as bad as sewer water. Getting people sick in the name of LEED does not seem to be the way to go.

Potentially greywater could be treated in a bioswale or series of detention ponds, but in California, this system is impossible to permit (Does anyone know of any States who allow this?). However, you can treat stormwater in that method.

how about grey water treating with wetlands/ aerobic system? there is need for open bond rite? instead using in sewage water treatment along with chemicals?

There are strict standards for greywater irrigation – it should not come in contact with people – therefore it is subsurface and also its application is dependent on soil percolation rate, meaning it should not pond to the surface. Not to say with all the rules it is not possible. More potable water is used irrigating landscapes than for basic…[Read more]

I always thought that greywater has too many pathogens to be safely used for irrigation anywhere people would come in contact with it. Not true?

I just started working at a new firm, Rana Creek. The first LEED project I am working on is a large scale neighborhood renovation project that will capture greywater from showers & laundry for a for landscape irrigation. It turns out from our initial calculations, all the homes intended for water harvesting collected too much water, so we needed…[Read more]

Well said Mark, our proffesion is so variable that it makes it easy for others to put us in a box on one side of it which I find to be simply ‘lanscaping’. We need to work together as a profession to be “armed with facts and calculations” to give creditability to the profession across the board.

Happy Thanksgiving!

This issue is complicated and to say that rain gardens are the answer is not much different than the traditional infrastructure approach, where one solution can solve all problems. In most instances and geographic locations, the solution needs to include water quality and quantity solutions to solve the problem. Rain gardens, bio-swales and…[Read more]

Just a thought from Soil Science perspective on reducing the water requirements for any plant. Use lots of organic material and or peat moss around the plant,(not too much) and surround other areas with sand. Make sure the drip is going on the water holding material. Sand has the lowest affinity for water while clay has the highest and organic…[Read more]

Charles,

“Blame it on the Rain” – Milli Vanilli

Well, not really. I just wanted to quote them! Policy is a difficult thing. Until every land owner is charged by the city for the real cost of thier stormwater impacts from a pre development hydrology, there will be uncecesary systems put ini place.
The cool thing about rain gardens is that for…[Read more]

Cole

Good comments. It is annoying to listen to disciples of the “new” green movement who lack the understanding necessary to design facilities that actually work and can be maintained (sustained). Even here in the NW we have LID facilities being required in locations where they just will not work.

Robin, not to be a sceptic: I have recently moved to hawaii though spent the last 5 years in the califonia working for a large engineering firm. It is difficult to get buy in from the engineers as the systems are simply not as functional there as they are in the NW. The reason for this is that the NW has rain year round whereas cali has no rain…[Read more]

….and a nicely planted raingarden, or artful rainwater catchment system usually looks better, provided it works correctly, than the typical curb and gutter system. I have found that the client is usally into this aspect of LID. In residential applications, is it wonderful if they take ownership of the process and work to make regulatory change…[Read more]