All modern hand dryers should dry hands in 10-12 seconds and it is therefore quite straightforward to calculate their running cost as, apart from electricity, there is usually little or no maintenance and no spares or consumables needed.
To calculate an actual cost we need to know:
With this information in hand, the running cost is easy to calculate.
Let’s assume that the average employee/user uses the facilities 5 times per day.
If there are 60 people sharing the boys and girls facilities, that’s 30 per hand dryer x 5 uses per day = 150 cycles per day.
If each cycle is 12 seconds = 0.5 hours per day of actual running time.
5 days per week? = 260 days per year x .5kW = 130hrs per year.
Electricity varies a lot in cost from supplier top supplier and region to region, however, 12p per kW is probably a fair average for 2017. A typical hand dryer uses about 1.5kW = 42p per hour.
130 hours per year x 42p = £54.60
By comparison, an old hand dryer might be using 2.6kW of power and taking 40 seconds to dry hands. This means that for the same usage, the cost will be 433 hours per year at 72.8p = £315.22.
This represents a real term saving of over £110.00 per hand dryer per year with only 30 users!!!
Prices updated May 2022
