Independent Hand Dryer Experts. This article, the second part of the great ‘Hand Dryer Vs Paper towels’ debate, looks at the cost element. If you haven't read the introduction - click here. For many people, this is the overriding reason for choosing one over the other, and is certainly the criterion the hand dryer manufacturers love to talk about. But is it as strong an argument as they make out?

Firstly, let me say that several hand dryer manufacturers have created their own calculators or cost illustrations, and some of them are extremely detailed. I have drawn on several of them, but I am trying not to be too anal about these calculations – the objective is to come up with a general opinion rather than any exact figures.

To start, let’s split this into the 2 most obvious areas: purchase price and running cost.

Purchase price - hand dryers and paper towels

In today’s highly competitive market, you can get hold of a high quality, efficient hand dryer which does a good job of drying hands  quickly, for around the £200 - £250 price mark. You don’t  need to spend much more than that, but for others reasons (that we look at in our related articles on hygiene, image and the environment), you may choose to do so.

If you spend much less than that, you’ll be buying an old-style, inefficient dryer which just won’t get the job done, will use too much electricity, and people will hate. Now, that might sound like a big generalization, but after selling thousands of hand dryers, I can tell you that it’s absolutely true.

So let’s assume we are talking about a £250 (plus VAT) investment, which we are making because we hope the running costs will be much cheaper than paper towels. Because the actual cost of paper towels is regarded as a running cost, the only real initial investment required in paper towels  is the dispenser, and as you can get these for around £20, I’m going to just ignore that.

Running costs- hand dryers and paper towels

So this is where we need to consider how many people will want to dry their hands per day or per year. To make this easier, I’m going to make some basic assumptions:

The ‘daily requirement’ of hand drying is 100 people. For most hand drying situations, this is very low, so I am giving the paper towel case a bit of a helping hand here.

Each person uses 2 paper towels to dry their hands. This seems to be the average number assumed by all the comparisons I have seen, and no-one seems to argue with it.

A paper towel costs £0.01.

Using a modern, efficient hand dryer (like the £250 model discussed earlier) I am assuming that

The ‘drying time’ is 15 seconds. This is slightly more than most manufacturers claim, but they mostly exaggerate.

The power consumption is 1.8kW. This is the top end of the modern dryers, with some being less than a third of this.

Electricity costs are £0.19 per kWh. This is pretty high, but prices are rising pretty quickly so it’ll mean this calculation remains valid for a while.

I am NOT taking into account the cost of getting an electrician in to fit the hand dryer, or any maintenance cost, but neither am I taking into account the cost of replenishing or cleaning up the mess of paper towels – these will either cancel each other out or leave a small cost not worth considering.

I am basing the calculations on there being 300 days in the year when the washroom may be used (i.e. somewhere between the number of working days (for an office) and the number of days a pub or restaurant may be open: it is also a nice round number).

So the calculation for one year’s running costs becomes:

Paper towels

100 ‘dries’ x 2 paper towels x £0.01 x 300 days = £600.00

Hand Dryer

100 ‘dries’ x 15 seconds x 19p/kWh x 300 days = £23.75

 The Conclusion

So the result is pretty conclusive: even at the very low usage of 100 dries per day, and trying to give the case for the paper towel a bit of a ‘leg-up’, the cost case is overwhelming.

It means that the payback period for a modern hand dryer is 6 months (at the most), and it could be a lot less.  From that point onwards you would be saving 95% of your paper towel costs. If cost is an important element of your decision, then you should probably be rushing out to buy a hand dryer right now.

Other things will also be important in your decision, though, so make sure you read the other articles in this series on hygiene, image and the environment.