Two units nobody converts
Conditioner arrives as a drum with a four-figure price on the invoice and leaves as millilitres nobody measures. In between there is no natural place where anyone divides one by the other, so the cost per game is a number most houses have never seen. It is small. At the defaults — 22.6 mL of conditioner and 34 mL of cleaner out of the tank, 32 games between dressings, drums at 460 and 180 dollars for five litres — one dressing costs $3.4832 in fluid and pads, and a game costs $0.1089.
Multiply that back out and it is not small any more. Twenty-four lanes running 5,200 games each is 124,800 games a year, and $13,589 of fluid and consumables.
Cents to four places, on purpose
Round $0.1089 to the nearest cent and you get eleven cents, which is a two percent error nobody notices. Run a house where a lane goes 96 games between dressings and the per-game figure drops to $0.0363, and at two decimal places that is four cents — an error of ten percent. Push the interval further and it rounds to zero. The whole point of a per-game figure is comparison, and rounding destroys the comparison before it can be made, so this page prints four places throughout.
The interval table only leans one way
Dressing less often always lowers the fluid cost per game, because the same dressing is divided by more games. The table shows exactly that and nothing else, which is the honest limit of it. What decides the actual interval is how the lanes play — carry-down, the transition through a league block, complaints from bowlers who noticed — and none of that is arithmetic. The table tells you what an interval change is worth in money so you can weigh it against a judgement it cannot make for you.
What is missing
Labour is not in here, and in most houses it is larger than the fluid. Walking a machine down 24 lanes takes what it takes whether the tank is full of the cheap conditioner or the dear one, and that time does not appear in a millilitre figure. Neither does the machine, its power, its own maintenance, or the lane sitting idle while it is dressed. Treat this as the consumables line of a bigger sum.
Questions people ask
Should I enter what the pattern puts on the lane or what leaves the tank?
What leaves the tank, because that is what you buy. The two differ by whatever sits in the buffer and the transfer lines and never reaches a board. If you only have the pattern figure, add your own buffer allowance before entering it.
How do I find the games between dressings?
The lane computer counts games. Take the count on a lane between two dressings over a couple of weeks and average it. Do not use games per day unless you genuinely dress once a day, and remember a Saturday and a Tuesday are different lanes for this purpose even when they are the same lane.
Why is the pad cost a separate field?
Because pads, wicks and towels are consumed per dressing rather than per millilitre, so they scale with the interval in a different way from the fluid. Keeping them separate means changing the drum price does not silently change them too. Set the field to zero if you track them elsewhere.
Is a cheaper conditioner worth it at these numbers?
That is a question about how the lanes play, not about the per-litre price, and this page cannot answer it. What it can do is tell you what the price difference is worth: change the drum price and read the yearly figure. Whether the cheaper fluid holds a pattern the same way is something you would have to test on your own lanes.