The clock is games, not months
Surface wear is spent by play, and play is not evenly spread. Pull a month of lane counts off the computer in almost any house and the middle pairs will be twenty to thirty percent above the house average while the end pairs sit below it. A schedule written in months treats all of them the same and is therefore wrong about all of them.
At the defaults — 5,200 games a year on an average lane and a busiest pair 22 percent above that — the surface carries 135,000 games. That is 26.0 years on the average lane, 21.3 on the busiest pair and 33.3 on the quietest: a twelve year spread inside one building.
Screenings are not free
It is easy to think of a screening as maintenance and a resurface as the event, but both come out of the same finite allowance. At 45,000 games between resurfaces and 9,000 between screenings there are four screenings inside a cycle, and at 0.2 mils each they remove 0.8 mils against the resurface own 1.5. That is more than a third of the cycle spent on the work nobody counts. Halve the screening interval and the cycle spends 2.7 mils instead of 2.3, and the surface loses a whole resurface off its life.
What the money says
One cycle costs $540 a lane — a $320 resurface and four $55 screenings — which is $0.0120 a game and $62.40 a year on a lane running 5,200 games. Across 24 lanes that is $1,497.60 a year, which is not a large number and is not the real one. The real one is the surface itself: $5,200 a lane, $124,800 for the house, spread over 26.0 years, which is $4,800 a year or $0.0385 a game. The consumable everybody watches costs a third of the consumable nobody does.
The numbers this page does not have
How many mils are actually left is a measurement, and it is the input the whole page turns on. Depth readings, whether the surface is flat enough to bowl a pattern the way it was designed, and how much has to come off to reach flat next time are all things measured by the people who do the work. None of that is asserted here and none of it can be inferred from a game count.
Questions people ask
Where do I get the mils of allowance left?
From your own depth readings, or from the company that laid the surface, who normally state a removable allowance for it. If nobody has measured, the honest answer is that you do not know it yet, and a schedule built on a guess will be wrong by however much the guess is wrong. This page will not supply the figure.
Should I resurface the whole house at once?
The page shows why houses stop doing that: at the default game counts the busiest pair reaches the end twelve years before the quietest, so doing everything together removes material from lanes that did not need it. Whether staggering it works for you also depends on how much a contractor charges for a short visit against a long one, which is a quote, not a calculation.
Does a screening count as a resurface?
Not as an interval, but very much as removal. The page counts the screenings that fall inside one resurface cycle and adds their mils to the cycle total, which is why the number of resurfaces left is lower than the allowance divided by the resurface depth alone.
Can this tell me whether my lanes are within tolerance?
No. Flatness, depth and whether a surface is acceptable for sanctioned play are measured with instruments and judged against rules published by the body that sanctions the house. This page subtracts numbers you supply and makes no claim about any of that.