breaker 40-60: sander 25-35: mixer 30-45
Advanced options
The honest-days input is where this calculator earns its keep: the shed is full of tools bought for one job on an imagined future of projects (the mitre saw used twice is a national monument). The sorting rule: buy the tools of REPETITION (drill, driver, sander if you refinish things), hire the tools of OCCASION (breaker, floor sander, cement mixer, scaffold tower, anything with a blade bigger than your commitment). Hire also delivers pro-grade kit: the GBP 45/day floor sander does in one day what the GBP 120 bought toy does badly in three.
What The Tool Hire vs Buy Calculator Works Out
- Verdict: the hire rate multiplied by your honest days of use over three years, against the purchase price. Hire rates run GBP 25-60 a day for a breaker, floor sander, mixer or tower, so break-even usually arrives in 3-6 hire days, and the whole answer rests on counting the days you will actually use it rather than the days you can imagine.
- Break-even: the purchase price divided by the daily hire rate, rounded up: the number of hire days at which owning becomes cheaper.
- The sorting rule: buy tools of repetition (drill, driver, the sander of anyone who refinishes things) and hire tools of occasion (breaker, floor sander, mixer, scaffold tower). Close calls break toward hire for anything used under about 5 days in 3 years, and hire delivers pro-grade kit.
- Third options: the used market is flooded with one-job tools at 40-60% off from people who ran this sum too late; the street's tool-owner lends for a bottle; and libraries of things lend drills and carpet cleaners for a few pounds.
- Consumables and collection per hire (advanced): fuel, sanding sheets, blades and chisels are charged on top of the hire rate, and each hire costs a trip to the counter and back. Days per hire sets how many trips a given number of days needs; a weekend hire covering two days is one trip.
- Ownership upkeep per year (advanced): cordless batteries die between uses at GBP 40-80 a replacement, petrol kit wants servicing and blades need sharpening. The annual figure is multiplied over the three years.
- Resale value after 3 years (advanced): what you could sell the tool for, as a percentage of its new price; good-brand power tools often fetch 30-50% used. It is deducted from both the new and the used ownership routes.
- Buy used instead (advanced): the purchase price as a percentage of new, defaulting to 55% to match the 40-60% discount one-job tools sell at. Combined with a resale value, the buy-used-sell-after cycle nets the job's tool cost to pennies.
- All-in totals and the cheapest route (advanced): hire, buy new and buy used each costed with every hidden line included, the cheapest shown per day of use, and the table below the results setting all three side by side.