How Does a Hand Dryer Save Money Versus Paper Towels?
Everyday the debate about the benefits of a paper towel dispenser versus a hand dryer continues, making it hard for businesses to decide which one will work for them. Everyone wants to provide their customers with the best, most effective hand drying method without looking cheap. Historically air hand dryers have proven significant savings by eliminating paper towel costs, but have never worked. New high speed hand blower dryers can finally dry hands in 10 seconds and receive high praise, but do they finally make financial sense? Everyone has their preference for hand drying, but assuming that both deliver an equal hand drying experience we will look at the pure costs of hand dryers vs paper towels.
Paper Towels
Buying paper towels is costly business. An office building with 50 restrooms that are used 200 times a day easily spends $3000 a month on paper towels. That’s $36,000 spent each year so that people can dry their hands and dispose of the paper towel. While paper towels are often made of recycled paper, they can not be recycled themselves. The best an Earth-conscious facility can do is compost. To compare effectively to a hand dryer, we need to put both paper towels and hand dryers on equal terms. The life-cycle analysis of one paper towel is 9.71 watts. Most people use two or three paper towels when they dry and many dispensers release four or five paper towels when someone tries to pull just one. Using a conservative estimate, we can safely assume one person drying hands would require 19.42 watts.
Hand Dryers
The most energy efficient hand dryer right now requires 1100 watts to dry hands in 10 seconds. Each dry takes 10 seconds, or 1100 watts / 3600 seconds = 2.9 watts (0.0029 kw). Compared to the 19.42 watts for a paper towel, one hand dryer uses as much energy as 13 paper towels. If we use the national average for electricity, $0.0995 / KwH, then one dry with a hand dryer costs $0.0002. For 200 uses a day, the cost comes to $0.058 for the day, per restroom. 50 restrooms for one month would total 50 x 30 x $0.058 = $86.55 per month. That’s $2913.45 cents cheaper than paper towels every month and a savings over paper towels of about $35,000 per year.
Obviously a 50 restroom building will show bigger numbers than a 2 restroom restaurant, so let’s look at percentages. The cost of paper towels for our 50 restroom building is $3000, versus the $86.55 for the hand dryer. To achieve equal results, the hand dryer requires 3% of the cost.
Results
The hand dryer is far and away the cheaper option between the two, personal preferences not-withstanding. Some people will prefer one method to the other, but on the basis of savings, there is no comparison.
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