Business costs for dry cleaners and launderettes

The load is heat. Boilers generating steam for presses and finishing, hot water for washing, and tumble dryers running through the day. In a gas-fired operation, gas is usually the larger bill and the one that gets least attention — most operators shop the electricity contract and leave gas on a rollover. Given the volume of gas a laundry uses, that is usually the wrong way round.

• Tender gas as seriously as electricity. On a steam-based operation it is frequently the bigger number, and negotiated fixed gas has been running 7–9p per kWh against 10–14p deemed.
• Boiler maintenance and descaling directly affect fuel consumption — a scaled boiler burns more for the same steam.
• Insulate steam lines and fix leaking traps. Steam leaks are continuous losses that are easy to hear and easy to ignore.
• Tumble dryer lint filters and ducting affect drying time, which is the same as affecting your gas or electricity bill.
• Heat recovery from waste hot water is a real option at laundry volumes and worth costing.

Dry cleaning generates still residues, contaminated filters and cartridges that are classified as hazardous waste. They need a licensed carrier, consignment notes and correct storage, and they cannot go into a general commercial bin under any circumstances. The rest of the waste stream — packaging, hangers, polythene — is ordinary but voluminous.

• Solvent still residues, spent filters and cartridges — hazardous waste, consignment-noted, licensed carrier only.
• Keep your consignment notes. As the producer, you must be able to produce them.
• Polythene covers and packaging are high volume and low weight — a right-sizing problem rather than a price one.
• Wire hangers are recyclable as scrap metal at volume and some suppliers operate take-back schemes.

You are holding property belonging to other people, and the value of a rail of customer garments can be considerable. Customers’ goods cover — sometimes called bailee cover — is the section that responds when those are damaged, lost or destroyed, and it is frequently absent from generic retail packages. On top of that, solvent use changes your fire risk and the way the premises is rated.

• Customers’ goods / bailee cover — check the limit against the value of garments actually on your premises at a busy point.
• Machinery breakdown — a failed press or boiler stops trade entirely, and the equipment is specialist and slow to replace.
• Business interruption — with an indemnity period reflecting equipment lead times, which are long.
• Employers’ and public liability.
• Contents and stock, including glass.
• Environmental or pollution cover, relevant where solvents are used and increasingly asked about.

A dry cleaner’s connectivity requirement is small: card payments, and a ticketing or point-of-sale system that tracks which garment belongs to which customer. That second one is not optional — losing access to it mid-day means you cannot reliably return garments, which is a customer service failure of a different order to a slow card machine.

• Business fibre at £25–£60 a month is comfortably enough bandwidth.
• Understand how your ticketing system behaves offline, and make sure there is a manual fallback.
• 4G failover keeps card payments running through an outage for a small monthly cost.