Cutting Gas Bills Its Easy When You Know How

In many areas of the west, local gas and electric utilities charge differently in winter months than in summer. In California for example, about the first of April, gas prices go down only to be programmed to rise again in the fall. The Public Utility Commissions feel that they want to discourage gas use in winter by raising the cost per therm and lowering the price in summer when there is less demand. That may be fine for use in homes, but for a coin laundry it is exactly opposite of what it should be. The best coin laundry months are in winter and the worst in summer. So this policy charges more for use in the months when it hurts coin laundry operators the most. Of course it’s really unfair, but our industry doesn’t yet seem to pack enough weight politically to have it changed. Only the aggressively thrifty coin laundry operator can affect his or her own gas bills The first thing that is needed to start an intelligent program for utility cost cutting is to know how your bills are calculated. How do the utilities charge your business for gas, water and electric services? Once you have an understanding of that, it makes it easier to make the right savings choices. Check Your Natural Gas Bill Look at your laundry’s gas bill to see if you can learn enough to understand the way your utility charges you for the energy you pay for. Odds are your bill is rendered either in CCF, which is shorthand for one hundred cubic feet of gas, or it’s in therms, which is just another name for 100 cubic feet of natural gas that some of our utilities use to charge you. A therm being equal to 100 cubic feet of natural gas and a cubic foot creates 1,000 British Thermal Units which means a therm is 100,000 BTUs, or the amount of gas it takes to raise the temperature of one gallon of water by one degree. One of the easiest ways to get an idea of how your laundry business uses natural gas is to periodically walk past the dryers to see which setting is the most frequently selected by your coin laundry’s clientele. Use that as being the average temperature setting for your laundry’s dryers. Knowing what the average setting is, you will be able to calculate the approximate amount of gas being used per dry. You already know the time allowed for each coin inserted, and what part of that time is cool down time. Now it’s a choice of doing some simple mathematics. A 10 minute cycle with 2 minutes cool down means dryer burners will cycle on and off for about 8 minutes per quarter inserted. About half of that is burn time, or four minutes. Dividing 4 minutes burn time by the number of quarters collected from the coin boxes, you will be very close to knowing how many BTUs out there are for each coin in. If your dryers are rated 90,000 BTU per hour, in 4 minutes you burn about one fifteenth (60 Min ÷ 4) of that amount of gas or 6,000 BTU per each quarter you collect from dryer coin boxes. To carry this a bit further, suppose you take in 4,000 quarters over a month, that means your dryers have burnt about 24 million BTUs of natural gas energy. That huge amount may intimidate us just a little, but you can now see that counting the coins tells you the total number of cycles used. The total quarters collected times the 6000 BTU used gives an approximate gas total for each quarter customers put in the dryers. Now, subtract that figure from the total gas used and you will know the approximate amount of natural gas used to heat water. In most coin laundries this will come to about 50/50. In some it will be more like 60/40 in favor of water heating. With knowledge of approximate dryer gas usage and a good idea of the gas used for water heating, it becomes easier to figure where and how to start economizing. Now that we understand gas bills better, let’s figure how we can use that knowledge. Most operators, if faced with rising prices, either cut costs or raise prices. While a vend price increase isn’t always a good option, because of area economics or having low price competition, lowering expenses never goes out of style. Let’s use what we know to try to lower the natural gas bill. By shortening the drying time per coin or keeping the time the same but making cool down longer, the price has been raised and the amount of gas per drying cycle has been decreased. By adjusting the incoming hot water temperature down from the heaters, the washer vend price has remained the same, but gas consumption has been reduced and the natural gas bill lowered. If dryer exhaust vents are cleaned on an irregular basis, that means the dryers are not always running at full efficiency. Lint can build up and create resistance to the air flow and that costs money. Combining a lowered dry time with cleaning vents more regularly may make the time less obvious because the dryers are running more efficiently. There is another quick check that can be made on dryers. If the burners show a yellow, lazy flame, gas is being wasted and the burners need to be adjusted. The burner flame needs to rise steady with a bright blue tip. That means the gas is being used with maximum efficiency. There is a service offered at a price most laundry owners will love. Many utility companies will actually come and adjust the dryer burners for you at no charge. Some operators bring in water from incoming city lines, through a manifold laid over the dryers. Dryer heat is radiated into the copper lines in the manifold, preheating water and thereby reducing the cost of gas required to bring wash water to the proper temperature. The point of this article is that anything done to understand utility costs makes you, the laundry operator, better able to think of ways to cut your natural gas bill. Most of us just pay the bill and grumble about it. Smarter ones know that something can be done about gas bills, and they do what they can about it. Which are you, dumb or smart