It can go either way. If your drywell has a lot of little areas that qualify as LHRA, you may be better off posting the whole thing or entire elevations. That will please the regulators a lot more than if you post each area individually and they find one barricade down or one flashing light not lighted every day. A lot of PWR's can't post their containments because they are just too large compared to the size of the actual LHRA's. This leaves them with a whole bunch of little LHRA's with temporary barricades and battery powered lights. They are constantly getting LHRA violations for a barricade being left down or a dead light.
Then there is the laundry/trash issue. If you don't post the whole DW as a LHRA, you have to keep checking all those containers inside, and you have to have tighter monitoring over the removal of the bags. I think RRhoads missed the fact that you do have different allowable dose rates on open bags inside LHRA than bags in HRA. If you pull laundry from LHRA and put it in a HRA, you may have created another LHRA that isn't posted. So, you have to bring a meter every time if the DW isn't posted at the door. The pasing tools across boundaries is a bit much though. As long as the contamination posting is the same on both sides, this shouldn't be an issue.
OTOH, you really don't want LHRA controls over dozens of workers who are in relatively low dose rates. If you post the DW at the door, and half or more of the people on your telemetry are in <15 mR/hr, it's just going to clog up your monitoring of the ones who really need it.
You also have to consider that it may not be ALARA to brief everyone for LHRA when they are not working near the higher dose rates. Essentially, that would be the same as giving a license for a worker to go anywhere in the area when his job is in a low dose area. Without physical boundaries, postings, locks, or lights to stop them, they are just going to wander into higher dose rates than their jobs require. That means that you have to babysit them with the telemetry - taking your attention away from those who really need it.
There is a compromise. Post whole elevations - especially the ones that are harder to get to or are smaller. Most BWR's will post the higher elevations LHRA and leave the larger lower levels as HRA or RA. OR - you can post at the door, but put up warning signs and flashing lights to keep people clear of the higher rates. Some places use these "information" postings within posted areas to remind people to stay away from areas where they don't need to be. I think your neighbors at PI use somthing with an owl on it. Others use an additional "STOP" sign on postings that have changed.
Do you guys still have the High High Radiation Areas, or the Strange Areas? Those were kind of cool.
Does this muddy the water for you? It should. What works elsewhere will probably not work for you. "Benchmarking" (a term I hate with every fiber of my being) only works when you remember that you aren't going to find the perfect answer in someone else's sandbox. That's what they pay you for - aren't you glad?? If there were one definitive procedure fot Rad Protection that covered all plants, there wouldn't be any need for intelligent people to do this job. Basically, one RPM and an army of monkeys could cover the whole country.