Cleaning Cost

Parts Cleaning Cost Per Part: How to Quote Washing and Degreasing

What actually drives cost per part in industrial cleaning and how to build a quote that holds up under scrutiny.

Cost per part in cleaning is dominated by four buckets: chemistry and utilities, direct labor, machine time and depreciation, and waste disposal. For a typical aqueous line, expect chemistry to run 0.02 to 0.15 dollars per part, labor 0.05 to 0.40 dollars, machine time 0.03 to 0.20 dollars, and waste 0.01 to 0.10 dollars. A commodity fastener might total under 0.10 dollars all-in, while a precision hydraulic valve body with gravimetric verification can exceed 1.50 dollars. Start every quote by splitting these four buckets rather than applying a flat per-part rate, because the mix shifts wildly by part and cleanliness spec.

Chemistry cost hinges on bath life and drag-out, not the drum price. If concentrate costs 6 dollars per liter and a bath consumes 6 liters of active product over 1000 parts, chemistry is 0.036 dollars per part before make-up water and heating. The trap is drag-out: parts with pockets and threads can double consumption, halving bath life and doubling that number to 0.072 dollars. Use the Aqueous Cleaner Cost and Cleaning Bath Life calculators to base chemistry cost on real drag-out and titration windows rather than a catalog figure. Undercounting drag-out is the single most common quoting error in this category.

Labor is usually the largest line and the easiest to underquote. Price it as fully burdened rate times touch time per part, then add inspection. A loader at 32 dollars per hour fully burdened who handles 180 parts per hour contributes 32 / 180 = 0.178 dollars per part in handling alone. Add cleanliness inspection: a 20 minute gravimetric check on a 20 part sample from a 500 part lot spreads 0.44 hours of QC across those parts, roughly 0.03 dollars each, but on a 50 part lot it balloons past 0.28 dollars. The Cleaning Labor Cost and Cleanliness Inspection Workload calculators keep both touch and QC time honest.

Machine time cost blends energy, depreciation, and the opportunity cost of a slow cycle. A washer drawing 18 kW at 0.12 dollars per kWh costs 2.16 dollars per hour to run; across 180 parts per hour that is 0.012 dollars per part in energy alone. Layer in equipment recovery: a 250,000 dollar line depreciated over 7 years and 3500 run hours yearly adds about 10 dollars per hour, or 0.056 dollars per part at that throughput. When drying controls the cycle and throughput falls to 120 parts per hour, the same fixed costs jump 50 percent per part. The Parts Washing Cost and Washer Throughput calculators expose that leverage.

Waste and disposal costs are small per part but carry regulatory tail risk. Spent aqueous baths, oily filtrate, and solvent still bottoms typically cost 0.50 to 2.50 dollars per gallon to haul and manifest. A 200 liter bath dumped every 1000 parts is about 53 gallons; at 1.50 dollars per gallon that is 80 dollars, or 0.08 dollars per part. Solvent lines add still-bottom disposal plus SNAP and air-permit compliance overhead. Quote disposal as a real line item tied to dump frequency, and revisit it whenever bath life assumptions change, because a halved bath life doubles this cost silently.

Build the quote bottom-up, then pressure-test it. Sum the four buckets to a direct cost, apply a scrap or rework allowance of 1 to 4 percent for parts that fail cleanliness and recirculate, then add overhead and margin. If direct cost is 0.42 dollars per part, a 3 percent rework factor lifts it to 0.433, and a 22 percent shop overhead brings it to 0.53 before margin. A 15 percent margin lands the price near 0.61 dollars per part. Show the customer the buckets, because a defensible cleaning quote wins on transparency, not on a mysterious flat rate.

Volume and batching change the economics more than any single input. Fixed setup, bath heat-up, and first-article inspection amortize over lot size, so a 100 part order can cost 3 to 5 times per part what a 5000 part order does. Heating a 200 liter bath from cold burns 12 to 20 kWh regardless of whether you run 50 parts or 500. Always ask for annual volume and typical lot size before quoting, and price small lots with an explicit setup charge rather than hiding it in the per-part rate where it will erode margin on every short run.

The biggest estimate failures come from stale assumptions, not bad arithmetic. Drag-out drifts up as tooling wears and part geometry changes, bath life shortens when soil load rises, and inspection time creeps when a customer tightens the residue spec from 5 to 2 milligrams per part. Re-baseline chemistry consumption and QC minutes every quarter or after any process change, and reconcile quoted versus actual cost per part monthly. If actual chemistry cost is running 40 percent over quote, drag-out is almost always the culprit, and the Solvent Usage or Aqueous Cleaner Cost calculators will show it fast.

Published 2026-07-01.