The purchase price is the line everyone looks at when buying urinals for a portable toilet rental fleet, but it is only the visible part of the total cost of ownership (TCO). Over the years you also pay for replacements, service runs, labour, cabins standing idle in peak season and spare stock in the warehouse. For a company running a hundred cabins or more, these lines can outweigh the price difference between two products. Below is a way to add them up using your own figures.
What goes into the cost of a rental urinal
Six items make up the full picture: the purchase price; how often the unit has to be replaced under hard rental use; the cost of the replacement unit itself; the service run to the site; the fitter’s time; and lost rental income if a cabin is out of action in season. Spare stock in the warehouse is a seventh, smaller item. Comparing on price alone tilts the result towards the cheapest option, whether or not it is cheaper to own.
How to calculate it: one formula
Work per position (one urinal in one cabin) over the horizon you plan for, H, in years or seasons:
TCO = P + R × (P + V + L + D)
- P – purchase price of one urinal.
- R – expected number of replacements per position over H. Take it from your service log: units replaced last year divided by units installed, multiplied by H.
- V – the share of a service run attributable to the swap. If the swap is done during a scheduled visit, V is close to zero.
- L – fitter’s time: hours per swap multiplied by the hourly rate.
- D – lost rental income if the swap happens in season; zero if it is done off-season.
Multiply the result by the number of positions in the fleet. The bracket, C = P + V + L + D, is the cost of one replacement. A more expensive option pays off only if it saves more replacements than its extra purchase price divided by C.
Worked example
The figures below are invented to show the arithmetic, in any currency. They are not prices or failure rates of any material or product, Pi-Pi included.
Option A costs P = 20, option B costs P = 30. A service run share V = 40, fitter’s time L = 0.5 h × 40 = 20, average lost rental per swap D = 40. One replacement then costs C = 120 for A and C = 130 for B.
- Your records show A replaced 0.5 times per position over five years, B 0.2 times. TCO for A = 20 + 0.5 × 120 = 80. TCO for B = 30 + 0.2 × 130 = 56. Across 100 positions: 8,000 against 5,600.
- Your records show the same rate for both, R = 0.3. TCO for A = 20 + 0.3 × 120 = 56. TCO for B = 30 + 0.3 × 130 = 69. The cheaper option wins.
- Break-even. The price difference of 10 divided by a replacement cost of about 125 gives roughly 0.08. Option B pays off only if it saves at least about 8 replacements per 100 positions over the horizon.
The lesson is not that the dearer option is always better. It is that R decides the outcome, and R comes from your own fleet.
PP and LLDPE: what the material changes in the formula
Rental urinals are trucked between sites, stored outdoors over winter and knocked during loading. Two material properties feed into R under those conditions.
Cold. Unfilled PP homopolymer has its glass transition around 0 °C, and near and below that point its impact strength drops markedly: a knock that a warm part would take can crack a cold one. Impact-modified PP copolymers keep considerably more toughness in the cold, so ‘PP’ is not one material. The grade on your supplier’s datasheet is what counts.
Sunlight. Polypropylene is chemically more prone to UV oxidation than polyethylene. In a finished part, however, the UV stabiliser and pigment package matter as much as the base polymer, so ask the supplier what the part contains.
Pi-Pi Standard and Standard Plus urinals are rotomoulded from LLDPE that stays flexible and impact-resistant down to −40 °C. Whether and how far that changes R in your fleet depends on how often units travel, how they are stored and the climate on your sites. That is why the calculation should run on your service records, not on anyone’s brochure.
Downtime in peak season
A swap in March, before the season opens, is routine maintenance. The same swap in July, at the height of the festival and construction season, can cost rental days on that cabin, depending on how fully booked the fleet is. That cost is D in the formula, and it is the reason to log not only how many swaps you made but when.
Spare stock
A rental company keeps spare urinals in the warehouse. The lower R is, the slower that stock is used and the less money sits on the shelf. It is rarely the largest item, but on a large fleet it is worth adding to the calculation.
Volume and project pricing
For rental fleets Pi-Pi quotes volume and project prices on request – see the terms for B2B and the public sector. Put the quoted price into the formula as P, and the comparison runs on real numbers.
When the cheapest option makes sense
On short one-off projects where the urinal is written off after a season or two, H is short and R stays close to zero. The formula then reduces to TCO ≈ P, and the purchase price decides. For that kind of use, Pi-Pi is more product than you need.
Conclusion
For a fleet that works more than one season, the difference in cost of ownership is decided by R, the number of replacements, and by what each replacement costs you in units, service runs, labour and lost rental. Work out P, V, L and D from your own rates, take R from your service log, and compare. To check the material in your own conditions before a large order, order a Pi-Pi sample: on a wholesale order, the cost of the sample is deducted from the quote.
