Reline Cost

Costing and Quoting a Furnace Reline: Material, Labor, and Downtime

What actually drives cost per lining job, how to price a reline, and the estimating errors that erase margin on refractory work.

Cost per lining job splits into five buckets: material, install labor, dryout fuel, production downtime, and overhead. Material commonly runs 30 to 45 percent of a total reline, labor 20 to 35 percent, and downtime can dwarf both. Dense castable lands around 1.20 to 3.50 dollars per kg, high-alumina brick 2.00 to 6.00 dollars per kg, and specialty SiC or zircon products 8 to 20 dollars per kg. For the 6.4-ton castable job, material alone spans 7,700 to 22,400 dollars before waste. Use the Cost Per Lining Job calculator to roll these buckets into one defensible number rather than quoting from a single per-ton figure.

Material cost is tonnage times unit price plus waste, and waste is where quotes leak. Gunning rebound loses 10 to 25 percent, cutting brick to fit wastes 5 to 8 percent, and partial bags left after a job are pure loss. If you quote 240 bags at placed volume but buy 264 to cover 10 percent rebound, that is a 24-bag gap someone pays for. Freight on refractory is heavy and real: at 200 to 400 dollars per ton over distance, a 7-ton order can carry 1,400 to 2,800 dollars of shipping that a material-only estimate ignores entirely.

Install labor is crew hours times loaded rate, and the loaded rate is the trap. A refractory mason bills 45 to 85 dollars per hour, but loaded cost with benefits, per diem, travel, and supervision often reaches 90 to 140 dollars. A four-person crew relining a mid-size ladle in 3 days at 10 hours each is 120 crew-hours, so 10,800 to 16,800 dollars loaded. The Installation Labor calculator separates productive lay rate, roughly 0.8 to 1.5 square meters per mason-hour for brick, from setup, teardown, and cure standby that still burns paid hours.

Dryout fuel is a line most quotes drop and then eat. A controlled dryout holding 55 to 70 hours on gas burners at 1.5 to 3.5 GJ per hour, with natural gas near 8 to 14 dollars per GJ, adds 660 to 3,400 dollars in fuel plus burner rental and an attending technician. Skipping this line does not make it free; it moves the cost from the quote to your margin. The Dryout Time calculator sizes the schedule so you can attach real fuel hours to the estimate instead of a guess.

Downtime is usually the largest true cost and it belongs in the customer conversation even when it is not on your invoice. A production furnace idled for a reline loses contribution margin every hour: a mid-size melt shop can lose 2,000 to 8,000 dollars per hour of lost output, so a 5-day reline is 240,000 to 960,000 dollars of opportunity cost. The Furnace Downtime Cost calculator quantifies this, and it reframes the buying decision: a faster crew or a longer-life lining that costs 15 percent more is trivial against that clock.

Overhead and consumables are the quiet 8 to 15 percent that decides whether the job clears margin. Anchors, needles, mixers, gunning nozzles, expansion paper, mortar, PPE, scaffolding, and waste disposal of spent refractory at 40 to 120 dollars per ton all accrue. Add mobilization for remote sites and equipment rental by the day. A quote that captures material and labor but omits these lines runs 10 to 20 percent light, which on a 30,000 dollar job is 3,000 to 6,000 dollars of vanished profit before you have priced any risk.

Build the quote bottom up, not top down. Compute placed volume, convert to tonnage and bag count with waste, price material with freight, add crew hours at loaded rate, attach dryout fuel and technician time, layer overhead and consumables, then apply margin. Present downtime separately as customer economics. A top-down dollars-per-ton shortcut hides the mix: a job heavy on hand-laid precision brick can cost triple a gunned monolithic of the same tonnage because labor dominates, and one blended rate buries that difference until the crew is already on site.

Guard against the three estimates that go wrong most. First, quoting placed volume as purchase volume ignores 10 to 25 percent waste and shorts the order. Second, using bare wage instead of loaded labor understates crew cost by 40 to 70 percent. Third, pricing only the lining while ignoring downtime makes a premium product look expensive when it is actually the cheaper choice once lost output is counted. Anchor every quote to a wear-rate life estimate so the customer sees cost per campaign, not just cost per install, which is the number that actually governs their spend.

Published 2026-07-01.