Compressed Air Energy Cost Comparator

The class that wins on energy depends on how much of the shift the machine spends idling. Enter your flow, running hours, load factor and electricity price to see what each of the three machine classes would cost to run for a year on the same duty. The load factor is the fraction of running time spent delivering air rather than idling.

Specific power and unloaded-power figures come from the published class comparison on this page: 15–16 kW per 100 cfm for a two-stage double-acting reciprocating machine against 16–18 for a two-stage rotary screw, and 0.10–0.15 of full-load power drawn while unloaded against 0.20–0.30 for a screw, with centrifugal blow-off wasting the compressed air itself. The tool uses the midpoint of each published band and treats centrifugal blow-off as drawing full-load power. Both energy rows are published class comparisons from older reference works rather than our own test data, so use them to rank the classes and take guaranteed numbers from the specification table on this page.