Total Cost of Ownership

Purchase price is the cost everyone sees and the one that matters least. For energy-using equipment, the money spent buying it is usually dwarfed by the money spent running it: the motors course showed a motor consuming its own purchase price in electricity every few weeks. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is the discipline of counting every pound a piece of equipment costs across its whole life, and it routinely overturns the decision that purchase price alone would make. This lesson builds a TCO and shows why the cheap option so often turns out to be the expensive one.