The Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP), in partnership with the General Services Administration and with support from Pacific National Laboratory (PNNL), developed the Healthy Buildings Toolkit to support the identification of energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality (IEQ) upgrades, leveraging savings from productivity gains and reductions in utility expenditures to improve business cases.
The toolkit provides customized estimates for the financial savings and non-monetary benefits related to improving IEQ and occupant productivity. Browse the contents of the toolkit below.
Healthy Buildings and Energy Support Tool (H-BEST)
The H-BEST Tool provides streamlined and customized analytical support for building managers, operators, owners, energy managers, and sustainability professionals and helps users improve IEQ and energy efficiency in office buildings and workplace settings. The tool estimates the potential financial gains from improving productivity and reducing absenteeism as a result of optimizing IEQ conditions in a building.
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The H-BEST Tool monetizes productivity and absenteeism gains for comparison and solution prioritization. Monetized results may not apply directly to actual profit for all scenarios.
Download the H-BEST Tool from the Healthy Buildings Toolkit.
H-BEST Data Collection Guide
The H-BEST Data Collection Guide is an essential resource for toolkit users and provides instructions on how to collect IEQ and occupant data and enter it into the accompanying tool. The Data Collection Guide also includes a sample survey template to collect occupant data that can be entered into H-BEST.
Equipment Loaning Library
As part of pilot testing, FEMP has a set of IEQ sensors and equipment compatible with the toolkit. If you are a federal agency interested in borrowing this equipment for your own analysis, contact us for more information and to find out about the availability of this equipment.
If the Equipment Loaning Library is not available when needed, be sure to review the data input requirements stated in the Data Collection Guide before purchasing data loggers. H-BEST does not require use of any specific brand of data loggers.
Pilot Study Reports
Before making the Healthy Buildings Toolkit broadly accessible to the federal facility community, FEMP piloted it in federal facilities across the U.S. The Healthy Buildings Initiative Pilot Study Reports page detail the results of these projects.
Toolkit Resources
FEMP's Healthy Buildings Toolkit draws from an extensive review of previous studies and reports about healthy building practices. The following documents summarize this review and intend to provide an understanding for stakeholders about the landscape of healthy building standards, tools, research, guides, and practices.
- Existing Healthy Building Resources Overview: Fact sheet details the various types of available resources.
- Healthy Building Resources Presentation: Slides outlines the fact sheet at a high level.
- Collection of Healthy Buildings Resources: Spreadsheet contains the full list of resources collected to inform this review.