The bill splits in two and only half of it cares about you
Run the defaults and the split is stark. Roughly forty dollars a day of the utility bill is lighting, HVAC, the water heater holding a tank at temperature, the compressor and the meter charges — and every cent of it arrives on a day when nobody walks through the door. The part that actually moves with cycles is water, the gas to heat the fill, and the power to spin the drum, and on a thirty pound front loader vending at $5.50 that comes to well under a dollar.
That is the shape of the business. The marginal cost of one more turn is small, so an extra turn a day on every washer is nearly all contribution, while a slow Tuesday still burns the fixed half of the bill in full. This is why operators talk about turns per day rather than about vend price, and why a store with the same equipment and the same prices can be a good business on one corner and a bad one three miles away.
Heating the water is the variable cost that matters
Water itself is cheap by volume. Heating it is not. The arithmetic is fixed physics: a gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds, raising a pound of water one degree Fahrenheit takes one BTU, and a therm is 100,000 BTU. So a 22 gallon fill with 45 percent of it heated from 55 to 130 degrees needs 22 x 0.45 x 8.34 x 75 = 6,192 BTU into the water, and at 80 percent heater efficiency that is 7,741 BTU of gas, or 0.0774 therms.
Two things follow. The first is seasonal: incoming water in February can be twenty degrees colder than in August, which raises that number by a quarter or more without anything in the store changing. The second is that the heated share is a lever you partly control through which cycles you vend and at what price, and it is the only variable cost line big enough to be worth managing.
Turns have a hard ceiling and it is not demand
A 32 minute cycle in a 16 hour day cannot run more than 30 times, and that assumes the machine is reloaded the instant it stops. Real ceilings sit far below that because customers arrive in waves and machines sit idle between them. What the ceiling does tell you is where extra demand stops converting into revenue: once a machine type is running near its cycle limit during the busy hours, more customers do not produce more cycles on it, they produce a queue. That is an equipment decision, not a pricing one.
The calculator holds any machine type at its ceiling rather than pretending the turns you typed are achievable, and says so when it does.
Dryers are a different product sold by the minute
A washer sells a fixed cycle. A dryer sells time, and the customer decides how much of it to buy. That makes the dryer side sensitive to two things a washer is not: how long the vend runs for the price, and how well the washers extract. A machine that leaves more water in the load sells more dryer minutes, which reads as revenue and is really the customer paying for your extraction rate. Whether that is a good trade depends on whether they come back.
Where to take these numbers next
This page stops at utilities and rent. Payroll, if you have an attendant, belongs in a full cost stack: the employee cost calculator works out what an hour of staffed time actually costs above the wage, and the break-even calculator handles the general fixed-cost-and-contribution version of the question if your cost structure does not fit the shape here. If you are looking at the customer side of the same arithmetic, the home laundry cost calculator works out what a load costs someone with their own machines, which is the number your vend price is competing against.
For the machines themselves, own vs rent puts a cost per hour on capital equipment, and replacement budgeting covers the set-aside for the day a pocket dies.
Questions people ask
What does one wash cycle actually cost a laundromat in utilities?
It depends entirely on your own water, sewer and gas rates and on how much of the fill you heat, which is why this page asks for all of them rather than supplying a figure. What is general is the shape: water by volume is cheap, the gas to heat the fill is the largest variable line, and the electricity to run the drum is close to a rounding error. Put your own bill rates in and read the utility share column — and then notice how much of the monthly bill is not in that column at all, because it belongs to the store rather than to any cycle.
Should I raise vend prices or chase more turns?
The arithmetic here answers it for your store rather than in general. A price rise adds its full amount to every cycle you already run, and costs you whatever volume walks away. An extra turn adds the vend less the small variable cost, and costs you nothing fixed at all. Because the fixed half of the utility bill and the rent do not move either way, half a turn a day across the washers is usually worth more than it looks next to a quarter on the price. The number this page cannot give you is how much volume a price rise costs, because that is your street, not your spreadsheet.
Why is my winter utility bill so much higher with the same number of loads?
Incoming water temperature. Ground water at the meter can be twenty degrees colder in February than in August, and every gallon you heat needs that much more gas to reach the same supply temperature. Run the calculator twice with your summer and winter incoming temperatures and the difference in the heat column is the whole answer. Heating and lighting the building for longer dark hours adds to the fixed line on top of that.
What counts as fixed utility cost?
Anything that shows up on the bill in a month when the machines barely ran: lighting, heating and cooling the space, the water heater holding a tank at temperature all night, the air compressor, signage, any demand charge on the electric account, and the fixed monthly service fees on each meter. The reliable way to find it is to look at a genuinely slow month and see what the bills still came to. It matters because that number is what a slow day costs you, and it is the reason turns per day is the metric the business runs on.
Does this tell me whether a laundromat is a good investment?
No, and it is not built to. It works out what a cycle costs and what it vends for at rates you supply, and what volume covers the fixed costs you supply. It knows nothing about the lease, the demographics of the block, the condition of the equipment, what the seller's collections really were, or what a competitor two blocks away is about to do. Those are the questions that decide the outcome, and they belong with an accountant and with your own time spent counting cars in the lot.