Laundromat electricity: dryers, boilers and your peak

A laundry pays for electricity twice. Once for the kWh, and once, in Flanders, for its highest quarter-hour of the month. That quarter-hour comes when several dryers and water heaters run together. Start with control: stagger the heat and use a load shedder. When the peak still stays high, a business battery can deliver the part above your limit. It also keeps solar power from the quiet midday hours for the evening rush.

You see it on a Saturday. Every washer is full, three customers wait for a dryer, and the machines keep heating. It is good for turnover. But one busy quarter-hour like that sets your monthly peak, and you pay for it for a whole year. And the drop-off service and the ironing still come on top.

Many owners only look at the kWh. The part that hurts is the peak, and it grows with every dryer you add. A French energy broker estimates four washers and two dryers running together at 20 to 30 kW. A weekday afternoon with two machines looks nothing like that.

We size on measured data, not on guesses. For a garden contractor in Zele, we first monitored average and peak consumption for one month, then matched the solar panels to the real use. That is the right start for a laundry too. On a farm in Tielt, a battery system of 45 kVA and 123.2 kWh now gives the site more power. A heavier connection was not needed.

Where does the electricity go in a laundry, dry cleaner or laundromat?

Mostly into heat. Drying the laundry and heating the water take far more power than turning the drums, pumping water or lighting the shop.

The three trades look alike from the street, but their loads differ. A laundromat lets customers use washers and dryers. A dry cleaner cleans with a solvent machine and presses by hand or with a form finisher. A commercial laundry washes linen for hotels, care homes or companies, often on a much larger scale.

The City of Paris gives the typical day of a dry cleaner in its energy guide for shops. Ventilation runs all day. The iron, the dry-cleaning machine, the washer and the dryer come and go on top of it. The biggest bars in the day are the moments when all of them run together.

How big is the use? ARENE, the regional energy agency around Paris, looked at this in 2008. An average dry cleaner or small laundry used about 34,400 kWh a year. That was for a shop of 87 m² with about three employees. Those are French figures, but they show the scale: a small trade with a big meter.

What does the busiest quarter-hour cost a laundromat on the capacity tariff?

In Flanders, every kW of your monthly peak costs on average about 53.39 euro a year in 2026, excl. VAT. The Vlaamse Nutsregulator calls the highest quarter-hour of a month your monthly peak. Your billing peak is the average of the last 12 monthly peaks.

Two details make this hard for a laundromat. First, the time of day no longer matters for the grid part of the bill. Fluvius explains that the difference between day and night rate disappears from the grid tariffs. Second, a busy weekend comes back every month. So the peak is not a one-off: it lands in all 12 monthly peaks.

How much power do the machines draw? The French broker puts a standard professional tumble dryer at 4 to 9 kW and a washer at 2 to 4 kW. Your own machines have the rating on their plate. Take an example laundromat where all washers and dryers heat together on a Saturday: 28 kW. If a load shedder keeps the total at 18 kW, the dryers take a little longer, but the bill drops:

Everyone pays at least the minimum of 2.5 kW, and every kW above it costs the same. Sites with a larger connection and peak metering are also billed on their peaks. For the full formula, read our explanation of how the capacity tariff for businesses is calculated.

Are the dryers or the boilers the bigger problem for your peak?

Usually the dryers, because several of them heat at the same time and for a long time. Water heating comes second, and it depends on how you heat the water.

A dryer with electric heating elements draws its full power for most of the cycle. Put several side by side, all started within minutes of each other, and their heat adds up in one quarter-hour. The motor that turns the drum is small next to that.

Water is the second load. Many washers heat their own water with elements inside the machine. The French broker notes that a 60 °C wash uses clearly more than a cold wash, up to 40% more on water heating alone. Hotter programmes at the busiest hour push the peak up twice.

A larger laundry often heats with gas or steam. Then the electric peak comes from motors, presses and compressed air, and the gas bill carries the heat. VITO, the Flemish research institute, describes a laundry without a central steam boiler. Machines are heated directly, which avoids the losses of a steam network. It lists energy savings of 14 to 30% in specific cases. That route needs a gas connection, so it does not help the electric peak.

The rush hours in that strip are an example. An industry article on laundromats describes evenings and weekends as the typical peak periods. Your own quarter-hour data shows when yours are.

How do you keep the peak of a laundry down without buying a battery?

By making sure the heating elements do not all run in the same quarter-hour. Most laundries can cut their peak with control and new habits, before any big investment.

Our guide on how to read and lower your business peak demand shows how to find the quarter-hour that sets it, step by step.

Do solar panels help a laundry, and where should the surplus go?

They help with the kWh during the day, but they rarely touch an evening peak. A laundromat roof produces most at midday, when the shop is often calm.

On a weekday the panels cover lighting, the payment system and the machines that run. What the shop does not use goes into the grid. Injected power earns much less than you pay to buy it back in the evening. Our guide on whether solar panels still pay off on a business roof runs that calculation.

A laundry has one advantage here: it uses a lot of hot water. Storing surplus solar power as heat in a hot-water tank can be cheaper than storing it in a battery. Our article on when a boiler or buffer tank beats a battery for surplus solar explains when heat comes first.

When does a battery make sense for a laundry or laundromat?

When the peak that remains after control is still high every month, and the shop injects solar power during the day. Then one battery does two jobs: it stores the midday surplus and delivers it during the evening rush.

In a Victron system this is called peak shaving. The control keeps what you take from the grid under a limit you set. When the dryers pull above it, the battery delivers the difference. The kW above your limit set the inverter power, and the length of the rush sets the energy.

A battery has one advantage over a load shedder: the customer never notices. The dryers keep full power, and nobody waits longer for a machine. With a dynamic contract, the battery can also charge at the cheapest hours, as long as it does not create a new peak. Our article on a dynamic energy contract with a battery explains how.

Want the full picture of how a battery keeps a peak under a limit? Read our guide on what peak shaving is and when a battery pays off.

What happens to your connection when you switch dryers or boilers from gas to electric?

The heat moves from the gas meter to the electricity meter, and your peak jumps. Gas dryers and a gas boiler hide most of the heat from your electric peak today.

Before you order electric dryers or an electric boiler, check two things. Can your connection deliver the extra power at all, or will the main fuse trip? And what does the new peak cost every month on the capacity tariff? Our article on what happens to your connection and peak when you swap gas for a heat pump walks through the same questions for heating.

If the connection is too small, a heavier connection is not the only answer. On the farm in Tielt, the battery system adds power, so the site did not need a heavier connection. Our article on more power without a heavier grid connection compares the options.

Is it different for a laundry in Wallonia or Brussels?

Yes. In Wallonia a small shop pays no capacity term on the standard low-voltage tariff, but on the bi-hourly tariff the evening is the expensive time. Since 2026, the Walloon bi-hourly tariff has off-peak hours from 22:00 to 7:00 and from 11:00 to 17:00, according to the CWaPE.

For a laundromat that cuts both ways. Midday use falls in off-peak hours, but the rush from 17:00 to 22:00 pays the full rate. Larger sites with peak metering do pay a capacity term at ORES, so the peak still counts there. In Brussels, Sibelga charges small low-voltage sites a fixed amount that does not follow the measured peak. Our article on grid tariffs for businesses in Wallonia and Brussels explains the details per grid operator.

In Brussels your machine park also decides your environmental permit. Leefmilieu Brussel adds up the electric power of all washers and dryers. From 10 kW to 100 kW, a laundry, laundromat or dry cleaner with machines needs a class 2 permit. Above 100 kW it is class 1B. Every dryer you add counts twice: on the permit and on the peak.

What happens when you ask us to look at your laundry?

We start with your quarter-hour data and your busy hours, not with a battery size.

1. Step 1: Analysis and sizing. We look at your quarter-hour data, your dryers, your water heating and your roof. If data is missing, we can monitor your consumption for a short period first.
2. Step 2: Technical design. We check what control can do, then size the inverter on the part of the peak that remains.
3. Step 3: Installation and commissioning.
4. Step 4: Monitoring and support. Through our app and the VRM portal you follow consumption per phase, solar yield and the battery.

Our battery systems for businesses come with monitoring, control and optimisation included. That control is what turns stored energy into a lower peak. Want to know how a control layer decides when dryers, boilers and a battery run? Read our guide on what an energy management system does for a business.