How much money does a hotel lose to limescale?

Limescale costs a hotel money in five ways: energy, spare parts, cleaning hours, downtime and reputation. The part you can see, on shower screens and taps, is the cheapest. The expensive part is the one you don't see until the day something breaks.

The question is the title of one of our videos, and the answer it gives is an honest one: it is almost impossible to calculate, because a hotel has an annual budget for water treatment, but the consequences of limescale cannot be predicted. A pump that stops working, a machine that bursts, days with part of the hotel out of action. This article attempts the opposite: to turn the incalculable into a list of cost items that any technical manager can measure in their own establishment.

Limescale is like a secret police: you don't realise how much of it you have in your hotel, your hospital or your building until one day everything bursts. The dangerous part is the part you can't see.

DRAG'EAU Ibérica video

Why a hotel suffers more from limescale than a home

On the same mains water, a hotel builds up limescale much faster than a house. It is not bad luck: it is the sum of three factors that occur at the same time.

1. Temperature. Legionella prevention requires stored hot water to be kept at 60 °C or above. The hotter the water, the more limescale precipitates, so a hotel's storage cylinders and heat exchangers work right in the most scale-forming range.
2. Volume. Hundreds of showers a day, laundry, kitchen and, often, air conditioning and a pool. Every cubic metre of hard water that is heated leaves its load of carbonate somewhere.
3. Sensitive equipment. Commercial dishwashers that rinse at over 80 °C, espresso machines, ice machines, laundry steam boilers and cooling towers. All of them have heating elements, nozzles or heat exchangers that limescale chokes.

The five ways limescale costs money

1. Energy: hot water costs more to produce

Calcium carbonate is a thermal insulator. When it settles on a heat exchanger or on the heating element of a storage cylinder, more energy is needed to deliver the same temperature. The figure most widely used in the industry is around 10 % extra consumption for every millimetre of scale. In a hotel, where hot water is one of the largest energy costs, that percentage adds up to a lot of money every year, and it grows as the layer thickens.

2. Spare parts and breakdowns: what gets replaced too early

Clogged shower heads, aerators, seized thermostatic valves, dishwasher heating elements, solenoid valves, pumps that seize up, heat exchangers that have to be dismantled and cleaned with acid. Each one is a small purchase put down to wear and tear. Added up over a year and multiplied by the number of rooms, they are rarely small.

3. Cleaning hours and chemicals

This is the visible part: shower screens, taps and sanitaryware that housekeeping has to descale every day so the room looks new. It means minutes per room and litres of limescale remover every month. On top of that comes the periodic chemical descaling of coffee machines, dishwashers and boilers, which is usually covered by separate maintenance contracts.

4. Downtime: rooms and services out of action

This is the cost that hurts most and is hardest to predict. A room without hot water is a room that does not sell that night. A breakdown in hot water production or in the laundry can take an entire floor out of service, or the whole hotel for days, as the video describes. At that point the cost is no longer the spare part: it is the lost room nights and the compensation paid to guests.

5. Reputation: limescale shows up in reviews too

A shower with weak pressure, a shower screen with white marks or hot water that takes a long time to arrive all end up written on booking platforms. It is the hardest cost to quantify and the one that takes longest to recover from.

How to put a figure on limescale in your hotel

You do not need an audit to get an order of magnitude. It is enough to gather the data your accounts and maintenance teams already hold:

What can be done, from most to least recurring

1. 01

   Clean and descale

   Limescale remover in the rooms and chemical descaling of equipment. Necessary when the limescale is already there, but it does not stop it coming back: it is a cost that recurs every week and every year.

2. 02

   Salt softener

   Removes calcium from the water using a resin that is regenerated with salt. It protects the installation, but it uses salt and water, produces a discharge and needs servicing. The full comparison is in salt softener or physical treatment.

3. 03

   Physical limescale unit at the inlet

   An EF-i unit on the main water inlet makes limescale crystallise as a powder that does not stick. It protects everything downstream, with no consumables, no electricity and no change to the water's composition.

And if the hotel has closed heating or cooling circuits, their problem is not limescale but sludge and corrosion, and that is treated with a different unit, the DS-i Anti-sludge. A real case, with two chillers brought back into service, is in this article.

You can see how it was solved in a high-turnover hotel, with one EF-i for the hotel and another for the automatic irrigation, in our references.