How to calculate life cycle cost (LCC) in air cleaning?

Four easy tips and Excel template to find your best clean air solution

SHARE THIS ARTICLE
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
When investing in air cleaning, you need to make a professional LCC analysis of the life cycle cost of different solutions. You can read more about the LCC concept here. This article gives you specific and concrete tips on how to look deeper into your clean air procurement.

Whether you prefer the term LCC or Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), these are the areas where you need to do your homework.

By focusing on LCC, you get a complete basis for decision-making. You can relatively easily identify cost drivers and create long-term predictability in terms of finances and resource consumption. At the same time, you can more easily compare and know what questions to ask potential suppliers.

Fundamental to get the right function

Any air cleaning solution must first of all clean the air efficiently and down to the smallest possible particle size desirable for the premises in question. Different options can offer significant differences in efficiency. Cleaning must also be continuous and preferably without making too much noise, which is of great importance for offices and homes. All these parameters can be very different between different products and sometimes confusing.

For example, not everyone remembers that the decibel scale is logarithmic - an extra 10 dB is ten times the sound level! Many industry players also prefer to talk only about noise levels produced by the lowest operating mode, while emphasizing the efficiency of the highest.

LCC in air cleaning

The above are questions about more basic functionality and capacity, which is of course very important to evaluate between different proposals. Once we have achieved this level of hygiene in our procurement, we can move on to an even more professional level - a simple and more complete LCC analysis.

When it comes to the life cycle cost of air cleaning, there are four specific areas that you should scrutinize:

  • Investment cost - the price of the air cleaners is a given sub-component when assessing the whole life cycle cost. But with a lifespan of ten years or more, it is not as crucial as one might think.
  • Energy costs - even before today's sky-high energy prices, there can be a difference of hundreds of dollars or euros per month when using more comprehensive air cleaning solutions. There are many examples where the first year's energy cost is higher than the actual purchase. How many kW are needed to effectively operate your alternative solutions per hour, day and year?
  • Filter costs - many market players seem to be in the filter business rather than the air cleaning business. How often do you have to change filters to achieve sufficient air cleaning? What is the gradual decrease in efficiency after X number of weeks of use? This recurring cost depends on how often you need to change the filter, e.g. every 6 weeks or every 9 months.
  • Service costs - how often do you need to order professional service and maintenance to purify the air to the desired level? Are there parts that you can take care of yourself instead of bringing in external service personnel?

As always, ask questions and take references. You can also easily download this calculation template to evaluate different solutions. Be inspired by the questions that need to be asked and create your own assessment for a professional and successful decision on clean air in your premises. For your convenience, we have included basic facts about LightAir's industrial offerings, so you can quickly and easily make your comparisons.

¤ ¤ ¤

LightAir is convinced that our technology has advantages in terms of purification capacity, scalability and generated noise levels. In addition, we have yet to encounter a competitor that comes close to the low life cycle cost (LCC) that we can offer. This is consistent across our entire product portfolio, which covers the three main segments of the world market: industrial, commercial and consumer. Want to know more? Follow our blog! Or contact us directly for a dialog.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related articles