Budgeting For Sluice Room Equipment: Balancing Quality And Cost
Save money by thinking beyond the purchase price
You’re buying sluice room equipment for a reason – to prevent infections and ultimately save lives in your hospitals or care homes.
The human and financial cost of an infection outbreak far outweighs the purchase price of an individual medical pulp macerator or bedpan washer disinfector.
And yet the price difference between a robust, reliable machine and a poor-quality one that regularly breaks down can be comparatively small – especially when viewed over the decade-plus lifespan of the equipment.
High-quality, dependable sluice machines are always the better buy when you consider the total cost of ownership.
READ OUR DETAILED GUIDE TO SLUICE ROOM EQUIPMENT
Evaluate the total cost of ownership (TCO)
The initial purchase price of a machine is just one part of the TCO. So don’t be fooled by a headline price. Always dig deeper.
When evaluating TCO, you need to account for all costs associated with the equipment over its lifespan.
These will include not only the purchase price but also ongoing operating costs, maintenance, repairs, energy consumption, water usage, and the eventual cost of disposal or replacement.
Look for sluice machines that are energy- and water-efficient. Modern machines often come with features such as adjustable cycle lengths and automatic shut-off. These can help to reduce energy and water consumption, ultimately saving on utility costs.
DDC Dolphin’s engineers can configure the software in our machines to ensure they operate at optimum efficiency in your hospitals or care homes.
Quality sluice machines have lower amortisation costs
There’s a great deal of truth in the old saying ‘buy cheap, buy twice’.
A good macerator or bedpan washer will last at least 10 years – whereas one that is unreliable or poorly maintained may fail and need replacing after just seven years.
Will the low-cost machine that lasts seven years be 30% cheaper than the good machine that lasts over a decade? Unlikely – which immediately makes the so-called ‘cheaper’ machine a worse deal.
And that’s before you factor in the cost of breakdowns, as you’ll discover in the next section of this blog post.
Amortisation based on purchase price, machine lifespan and total running costs will give you the true cost of the equipment.
Only then will you see how frighteningly expensive some ostensibly ‘cheap’ sluice machines can really be.
Sluice machine reliability – how much do breakdowns really cost?
The true cost of macerator and bedpan washer breakdowns makes very sobering reading indeed. So it is important to be aware in advance.
Call out charges, hourly labour rates and the cost of parts can soon wipe out any saving you might have made at purchase.
Without a service contract in place, the average machine breakdown can cost you a significant sum. It doesn’t take too many breakdowns to make ‘pennywise pound foolish’ buyers realise that a better-quality machine costs much less in the long run.
Discover how planned preventative maintenance (PPM) reduces the likelihood and cost of machine downtime.
Cut the cost of sluice room consumables
Every sluice room machine requires consumables. Macerators consume medical pulp and need disinfectant; bedpan washers use wash with a built-in scale inhibitor.
So it’s important to address the cost of sluice room chemicals at the outset. Using the right chemicals will help to prolong the lifespan of your equipment.
Muddling along with poor quality alternatives is a false economy if they fail to protect your valuable machines or make them run less efficiently. It only takes 1 mm of limescale to increase energy usage by 11%.
And supposedly ‘cheap’ alternatives can actually require higher dosages – literally diluting any savings you may think you’re making.
It pays to consider packages such as 360° Chemical which enables you to purchase quality disinfectant and wash/scale inhibitor at a discount.
Staff training increases machine longevity
Untrained or poorly trained staff can unwittingly damage your valuable sluice room equipment. Machines can break down – with the risk of infection outbreaks as bedpan maceration or washing is disrupted.
So always factor in the cost of training staff.
It need not be expensive. Well-designed machines with intuitive controls that are simple to operate can minimise the amount of training needed (and therefore the cost).
DDC Dolphin offers comprehensive training and ongoing support to help minimise sluice room operational issues at your hospitals or care homes.
DDC Dolphin sluice machines
DDC Dolphin’s high-quality medical pulp macerators and bedpan washer disinfectors are more reliable than competitor machines.
We know this for a fact because we service and repair not just our own machines but also those of our competitors.
Our machines have reliability designed in. As experts in this specialised field, we see the design faults in competitor machines – and so can ensure they do not occur in our products.
As a world-class manufacturer with decades of experience, DDC Dolphin is used to supplying large numbers of medical pulp macerators and bedpan washer disinfectors to hospitals and care homes across the globe.
This generates economies of scale – giving you the opportunity to purchase high-quality machines with discounts available at volume. Finance packages help spread the cost of ownership and make budgeting easy and predictable.
DDC Dolphin machines are sold with the offer of a complete package that ensures lower ownership costs. First-class service and support packages cut the total cost of ownership and give you peace of mind.
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