Most buyers open a dryer inquiry with a single question: "How much is one grain dryer?" It feels natural, but it quietly sets you up for a bad decision. The true cost of owning a dryer is the sum of equipment (EXW) + heat energy + electricity + labor + maintenance + spoilage loss. Teams that fixate on the equipment number alone often discover, a season later, that the fuel bill ate the entire margin — or that grain left undried turned into a write-off. This article walks through each component using a total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) frame, so you can price the machine before you sign.
1. Equipment Cost: EXW Baseline, and Get the Currency Right
Our export quotations are built on an EXW (ex-works net price) baseline by default, shown in both RMB and USD on a dual-currency quote sheet. The USD figure must follow the exchange rate you confirm at the time of quotation — neither I nor any system should assume a rate. This matters more than it sounds: a 2% swing in the exchange rate moves the landed cost of a 100-TPD line by more than the price of a small option.
Factory pricing for drying equipment carries both a manufacturing margin and export-compliance loading. Critically, EXW does not include installation. On-site guidance and operator training are billed separately at USD 120 per person per day, with travel and lodging on the buyer's account. If you need a full EPC package (design through commissioning), that is a separate scope to agree up front — not something folded silently into the machine price.
Capacity spans a wide band — our 5HL / 5HX / 5HYZF series run from roughly 22 TPD up to 800 TPD. Unit cost does not scale linearly: larger capacity lowers cost per ton but raises the total ticket. Size the machine to your daily intake first; price is a consequence, not a starting point.
2. The Big Operating Line Item: Heat Energy
Heat typically accounts for more than half of a dryer's lifetime cost. Pick the wrong heat source and you bleed cash every season:
- Direct-fired vs indirect-fired: direct-fired is thermally efficient but the flame touches the grain, which carries a quality risk for heat-sensitive crops; indirect-fired (heat exchanged through a medium) protects grain quality — important for maize and paddy.
- Biomass vs diesel vs heat pump: in maize and rice regions, husk, straw and corn cobs are often cheap or nearly free, making biomass direct-fired the most economical option. Diesel is exposed to international oil-price swings. Heat pumps are clean but carry a higher equipment and investment cost, best suited to small, high-value batches.
As a rule of thumb, bringing maize from around 25% moisture down to a safe 14% costs a very different amount of energy per ton depending on your local fuel price and the starting moisture. This must be calculated against your own fuel cost, not borrowed from a generic constant. Our heat-source comparison breaks down the trade-offs in detail.
3. Electricity, Labor and Maintenance
Electricity is driven by fans, bucket elevators and the control system; higher automation lowers the labor line. Labor is significant for batch dryers (someone feeds and discharges) and drops sharply with automated continuous-flow lines. Maintenance — screens, bearings, heat-source ash cleaning — should be budgeted annually as a cost of ownership. The maintenance checklist by heat source is a useful reference when you build that line item.
4. The Most Overlooked Cost: Spoilage
The grain you fail to dry in time is often the largest invisible cost on the books. Third-party industry research (not AmGrainTech data) puts post-harvest loss in some regions into the double digits as a percentage of harvest. Bringing grain down to safe moisture, quickly and evenly, protects margin that would otherwise simply disappear — and that protected margin is usually the single biggest return a dryer delivers. It is the line most buyers forget to add up.
5. Putting the Numbers Together
A sound TCO comparison weighs the equipment price against years of fuel, power and maintenance, then credits the spoilage you avoid. A cheaper machine with a thirsty heat source almost always loses on lifetime cost. Size first, then compare like-for-like on the full sheet — not on the headline number.