Blower Costing

What Drives the Cost Per Blower and How to Build a Defensible Quote

Where the money actually goes in a fan or blower build, how to assemble each cost bucket into a quote that holds, and the estimating mistakes that quietly erase margin.

The cost of an industrial fan splits into purchased components, fabricated housing, direct labor, consumables, and burden, and the mix shifts hard with fan size. On a mid-size 25 hp centrifugal unit selling around 6,500 dollars, purchased parts often run 45 to 55 percent of factory cost: the motor alone can be 1,200 to 2,000 dollars, bearings and the shaft 400 to 700, and a VFD, if included, another 1,000 to 1,800. Because these are bought, not made, they carry little of your value-add, so pad them modestly for freight and vendor price drift, not for margin you should earn on labor and fabrication.

The housing is where estimators lose money, because scrap on flat stock hides inside a nesting diagram. A scroll housing and inlet cone might use 90 square feet of 12-gauge steel, but after nesting the blanks, real material utilization on a fan housing runs 65 to 78 percent, so you buy closer to 125 square feet. At 1.10 dollars per pound and roughly 5.0 pounds per square foot for 12-gauge, that is 688 pounds and about 757 dollars in steel to yield 90 usable feet. Sheet Metal Housing Yield turns your utilization percentage into the real purchased weight so the drop and skeleton scrap land in the quote instead of your margin.

Labor is driven by cycle time, not headcount, so cost it through takt. If assembly takt is 22 minutes per unit across a three-station line and your fully burdened shop rate is 68 dollars per hour, direct assembly labor is 0.367 hours times 68, or about 25 dollars per station and 75 dollars across three. Add balancing and test labor separately, since a two-plane balance plus an AMCA-style performance sweep can add 35 to 50 minutes, another 40 to 57 dollars. Assembly Takt and Labor Per Unit convert your line balance into a defensible per-unit labor figure rather than a guessed lump.

Paint and consumables are small per unit but easy to omit entirely. A mid-size housing has 45 to 70 square feet of coated surface; at a typical powder or industrial enamel coverage of 200 square feet per gallon and 45 dollars per gallon plus pretreatment, budget 12 to 20 dollars in coating material, before booth labor. Paint Area sizes the coated surface so you do not quote off a guessed number. Weld wire, fasteners, gaskets, and shipping crating add another 60 to 120 dollars. None of these individually moves the quote, but collectively omitting them shaves two to three points of margin on every unit you ship.

Overhead and scrap have to be applied as rates, not afterthoughts. If plant burden is recovered at 140 percent of direct labor, that 75 dollars of assembly labor carries 105 dollars of overhead. Scrap and rework belong in the quote as an allowance tied to first-pass yield: at 92 percent first-pass test yield, roughly 1 unit in 12 needs re-test or partial rework, so load 3 to 5 percent onto touch labor and test cost. Energy Cost also belongs in the customer conversation, since a fan running 6,000 hours at 16 kW and 0.13 dollars per kWh burns about 12,500 dollars a year in electricity, dwarfing first cost.

Assemble the quote as a stack, then apply margin last. Sum purchased parts, housing material from Sheet Metal Housing Yield, assembly and test labor, paint and consumables, and applied overhead to reach factory cost, then add a Warranty Risk reserve of 1.5 to 3 percent for field failures. Cost Per Blower rolls these lines into one figure. On the example unit, roughly 3,000 dollars purchased, 760 housing, 400 labor loaded with overhead near 560, 100 consumables, and a 120 warranty reserve land near 4,940 dollars factory cost. Quote Margin then sets your markup against that number, not against a back-of-envelope guess.

Estimates go wrong in predictable places. The three biggest leaks are assuming 100 percent material utilization on the housing (a 15-point yield miss on 757 dollars of steel is 113 dollars gone), costing labor at a bare wage instead of a burdened rate (missing 140 percent overhead understates labor by more than half), and forgetting test and re-test cost on a shared cell. A fourth is quoting energy as the customer's problem rather than your selling point: a fan two efficiency points better saves them roughly 250 dollars a year, which justifies a higher price. Build every quote from measured cycle times, real yields, and burdened rates, and the number will hold under scrutiny.

Published 2026-07-01.