Setting up a hotel laundry: capacity calculation, machines and layout

A hotel laundry is sized from your own linen weights, not from room count. Take peak occupied rooms, the change policy per stay, the weight of one linen set and the hours you can run, and you get kilos per day and kilos per hour; washers, dryers and an ironer follow from that number.

The laundry is the one department that must be right before the first guest arrives, and it cannot be fixed by hiring more people. It is easy to choose from a machine brochure and then find in August that the ironer, not the washers, is the bottleneck. This guide walks the hotel laundry setup from regulation to arithmetic to machine choice to layout, so you can argue with a supplier from numbers rather than from a brochure.

What does Turkish regulation actually require a hotel laundry to do?#

The Regulation on the Qualifications of Tourism Facilities sets laundry service duties by facility type, not room requirements, and it does not require an in-house laundry room. The duty is a guest service you may meet in-house or through an outside laundry. The Regulation on the Qualifications of Tourism Facilities (opens in a new tab) (mevzuat.gov.tr, consolidated to 31.08.2026) sets out what each facility type owes.

Three-star hotels owe a washing and ironing service, with a laundry bag and a price list (Article 19(4)(e)). Four-star hotels add a dry-cleaning service with a price list (Article 19(5)(f)), and five-star hotels include every four-star requirement (Article 19(6)). One- and two-star hotels have no laundry duty in their own lists, which does not stop them offering the service.

Holiday villages owe a washing and ironing service with bag and tariff, or washing machines for guests' use (Article 20(2)(ş)). Boutique hotels owe washing, ironing, dry cleaning and tailoring, with bag and tariff (Article 21(2)(k)). Apart hotels that offer no washing service must put an automatic washing machine in the apart rooms (Article 25(2)(c)(2)). Campsites must provide at least one washing machine and ironing place for every ten camper units (Article 36(1)(ç)(2)).

Source: mevzuat.gov.tr, Turizm Tesislerinin Niteliklerine İlişkin Yönetmelik (Karar Sayısı 1134), consolidated to 31.08.2026.

Read the duty as a service level, not a building. A hotel with no laundry room can still meet it, and a hotel with a laundry room can still fail it if the turnaround is slow. Regulation text changes; confirm your own facility type and the current consolidated wording with your adviser before you design anything. If you are weighing the two routes, whether to run the laundry in-house or outsource it is a separate decision that comes first.

How do you calculate hotel laundry capacity from room count?#

You convert rooms into kilos per day, then kilos per hour. The room count alone tells you nothing, because the weight depends on how many sets you change and what each set weighs.

Start from occupied rooms at peak, not from the room count. For example, a hotel that runs 60% in February and 95% in August has two different laundries, and you size for the second one. Fix the change policy first: how many times a set is changed per stay, whether pool and beach towels are added, and whether restaurant napery, spa towels and staff uniforms go through the same machines.

Then weigh one full set per room type on a kitchen scale: sheet, duvet cover, pillowcases, bath towel, hand towel, bath mat. Multiply by the number of sets and you have kilos per occupied room. Apply the formula from the Milnor planning guide "Sizing and Planning a Laundry" (opens in a new tab) (Pellerin Milnor Corporation, 2016): kilos per room per day × rooms × 7 × occupancy ÷ operating hours per week = kilos per hour to process.

That guide offers rules of thumb of 8 lb (about 3.6 kg) per room per day for budget hotels, 10 lb (about 4.5 kg) for standard and 12 lb (about 5.4 kg) for luxury, and notes that beach resorts have used 22 lb (about 10 kg) at 95%+ occupancy, seven days a week. Treat the guide's defaults of 80% occupancy and 40 operating hours a week as defaults, not as your hotel: your peak occupancy and your shift pattern are the real inputs. The same guide says collecting actual item, quantity and weight data is the professional approach.

Since towel weight, sheet fabric and how many sets you need determine the kilos, the textile purchase and the capacity calculation have to be made together.

Worked example: daily kilos, loads and shifts#

Here is the arithmetic end to end on an invented hotel, so you can see which number drives which machine. Every figure below is illustrative and must be replaced with your own weights.

For example: 120 rooms at 80% occupancy is 96 occupied rooms; at 5 kg of linen per occupied room per day that is 480 kg a day. Running seven days a week, eight hours a day, is 56 hours a week, so 480 × 7 ÷ 56 gives about 60 kg per hour to process.

An open-pocket washer-extractor running hotel sheets and towels at about 1.5 loads an hour would need a 40 kg drum to carry that alone, which leaves no room for a breakdown; two smaller machines give the same output with redundancy. Flatwork is about 65% of the weight, so roughly 312 kg a day goes to the ironer; check the ironer's rated output against the speed two operators can actually feed it, not against the brochure. Dry-fold is about 30%, roughly 144 kg a day of towels, and steam dryers need about a third more time on average than the same machine on another heat source.

Illustrative example, not a benchmark.

The shift pattern matters as much as the machines: a morning shift clears check-out linen, an afternoon shift prepares arrivals, and the weekend needs its own cover. Write the arithmetic on one page and keep it; it is the document you will argue with when someone proposes a bigger machine.

How are washers, dryers and ironers sized?#

Washers are sized by kilos per hour and by drum volume, dryers by the kilos of towels they must dry, and ironers by the flatwork kilos per hour. Each has a different limiting number.

Load factor is generally accepted at 5.5 to 6.5 lb of linen per cubic foot of cylinder volume, about 88 to 104 kg per cubic metre, so a machine's real capacity is its drum volume, not the badge on the door. Open-pocket machines run hotel sheets and towels at about 1.5 loads an hour; divided-cylinder machines run about 1.2, and that difference is often one machine or one shift. Continuous batch, or tunnel, washers are sized by batch size with an 85 to 90% efficiency factor; they suit a steady, large daily volume and punish a hotel that cannot keep the flow even.

Dryers are matched to the dry-fold kilos per hour, then corrected upward: steam dryers need about a third more time on average, and automatic batch tumble dryers exist for volume. Ironers handle flatwork only, roughly two thirds of the weight; check the working width against your sheet width, the rated speed, and whether one or two people feed it. Folding is a labour decision more than a machine decision: towels are usually folded by hand, and a towel folder only pays above a certain volume.

Because about 65% of the work is flatwork, 30% dry-fold and 5% garments, the bottleneck is usually the ironer or the dryer, not the washer.

Steam, gas or electric: what utilities does a hotel laundry need?#

The heating choice drives the building. Steam is fastest and needs a boiler and someone qualified to look after it, gas needs flues and ventilation, and electricity is the simplest to install but the heaviest on your supply.

Steam gives the fastest drying and a smooth ironing finish, and it needs a boiler, insulated pipe runs, condensate return and a maintenance routine; the boiler and pressure equipment fall under periodic inspection, which is a separate calendar. Gas-fired dryers and ironers need gas capacity at the point of use, a flue to a safe outlet and ventilation; confirm the available capacity with your gas distributor before you order. Electric machines are the easiest to permit and the easiest to place, but the heating elements dominate the electrical load; check transformer and panel capacity before signing.

Water is an input you can measure: consumption per kilo of linen, hot water supply, and hardness, because hard water scales the machines and dulls the linen over time. Drainage is where laundries fail quietly: large volumes leave quickly, so plan floor drains, lint traps and a discharge route your local water authority accepts. Ventilation is not optional: dryers and ironers release heat and moisture, and without make-up air and extraction the room stays wet, the machines work harder and mold appears. Build the floor for the job: sloped to drains, non-slip, chemical-resistant, and checked for load if you are placing a tunnel washer or a large ironer. If you run steam, periodic inspections of boilers and pressure equipment belong on the same maintenance calendar as your lifts and fire systems.

How should the laundry room be laid out?#

Soiled linen enters at one end and clean linen leaves at the other, with the clean side physically separated. Everything else in the layout follows from that one rule.

Zone the room: soiled receiving and sorting, washing, drying, ironing and folding, clean storage, dispatch. Each zone has its own trolley and its own floor marking. Put sorting and weighing at receiving, because that is where loss becomes visible and where you find out whether your par levels are real.

The one-way flow#

Keep the flow one-way: dirty linen goes in, clean linen comes out, and clean linen never crosses the soiled area or shares a trolley with it. Separate the clean side physically, with a wall or a clear distance, and store clean linen closed, off the floor, with air circulation. Allow working clearance in front of every machine for a person and a trolley, turning space at the ends, and a route to the service lift that does not pass guest areas. Place the laundry near the service lift and housekeeping and away from guest rooms, because noise, heat and vibration travel through structure.

Safety in the room#

Because sorting and weighing is where losses show up, the layout connects directly to par levels, laundry flow and linen losses.

What breaks in August, and what should you ask a supplier before signing?#

The ironer and the dryer stop the line, not the washer. Plan for a stoppage in the busiest week: spares, a named technician with a response time, and an outside laundry on standby.

Identify the single point that stops everything, which is usually the ironer, and protect it with a service contract rather than a spare machine. Hold the small spares that cause long stops: lint filters, door seals, hoses, a spare trolley, and whatever consumable the machine will not run without. Write a response time and a named technician into the contract, and ask the supplier directly what happens on a Friday night in August. Sign a rate with an outside laundry before you need it; an emergency arrangement negotiated during a breakdown is expensive and slow.

Ask for the rated kilos and the drum volume, the hourly output at 1.5 loads an hour, the utility demand at peak, the maintenance interval, what the warranty excludes, and a layout drawing with clearances. Ask who commissions the machines and trains the team, and insist on test loads: run your own linen through the ironer and check the finish and the speed before the first guest arrives. Keep the calculation from this article with the contract, so the next machine is bought from numbers rather than from a brochure.

What to do next#

Weigh one full linen set for each room type this week and write down your peak occupied rooms. Those two numbers, with your change policy and operating hours, are the whole calculation. The regulation tells you which service you owe, the calculation tells you how big the laundry is, and the layout protects the clean side from the soiled side.