A nursing-home laundry has a different job than a hotel's: it runs seven days a week, it handles residents' personal clothing alongside flatwork, and its wash process is part of the facility's infection-control program. But the sizing arithmetic is the same four steps — pounds per day, pounds per hour, washer capacity, dryer capacity. This guide walks it with a worked 90-bed example. The figures are industry planning numbers; Arrow sizes against your facility's actual census and linen program before quoting.
Step 1 — Estimate daily poundage from your census
The driver is pounds of laundry per resident per day — bed linen, towels, gowns, personal clothing, and the incontinence-driven changes that dominate volume in higher-acuity care.
| Care level | Planning lb / resident / day | What's driving it |
|---|---|---|
| Independent / assisted living | 4–8 lb | Personal laundry, light linen service |
| Skilled nursing | 8–14 lb | Daily bed changes, gowns, towels, personal items |
| High-acuity / heavy incontinence care | 14–16+ lb | Multiple daily linen changes, pads, barrier items |
Census × pounds per resident per day = daily poundage
Size on a realistic high census — near your licensed capacity — not this month's headcount. And if you're already operating, weigh your carts for a week; your own number beats any table.
Step 2 — Plan for a seven-day operation
Hotels can flex laundry around occupancy; care facilities can't skip a day. Divide the daily poundage by your real daily processing window (typically one 8-hour shift) to get required pounds per hour. Remember the laundry also has to catch up after a machine outage or a holiday short-shift — which is an argument for sizing with headroom, not to the wire.
Step 3 — Size the washers, and split them deliberately
A standard 45-minute wash formula gives each washer roughly 1.3 loads per hour — the figure Arrow's hotel sizing worksheets plan on — but healthcare formulas with extended hot-water holds run longer, so plan 1 to 1.3 loads per washer per hour depending on your wash process. Required washer capacity ≈ pounds per hour ÷ loads per hour. Then split it — in a care facility the split matters twice over:
- Redundancy. Laundry in a nursing home is a care function; a single-washer laundry that goes down is an operational incident. Two or more machines keep you running while one is serviced.
- Load separation. Residents' personal clothing runs in smaller, resident-separated batches on gentler programs — washing a dozen small personal loads in a 60-pound drum wastes water, time, and clothes. A capacity mix (larger machines for flatwork, a smaller washer for personal items) matches how the work actually arrives.
Step 4 — Size the dryers to the linen mix
A commercial dryer cycle runs about 40 minutes (1.5 loads per hour), and then a drying factor is applied for how much moisture the linen holds — in Arrow's sizing model that factor runs about 1.3–1.4 for a terry-and-flatwork mix like a care facility's. The result: required dryer capacity lands roughly 15–40% above washer capacity, and it pays to spec headroom — an under-dried laundry backs up at the dryers no matter how good the washers are. High-extract (soft-mount) washers spin more water out mechanically and directly shrink the dryer capacity you need — useful where the laundry room's gas or electrical service is limited, and gentler on the fabric budget over thousands of cycles.
The infection-control layer
Healthcare laundry has a spec dimension hotels don't: your wash process is surveyable. CDC guidance for healthcare laundry recognizes hot-water washing at sustained high temperature as well as validated low-temperature washing with appropriate laundry chemistry — and either way, the machine has to hold and repeat the programmed process, not approximately reach it. That means programmable controls, consistent temperature performance, and wash programs set up for your chemical vendor's process. Arrow specs and configures equipment for exactly this, and it's worth raising with us early — it affects which machines are candidates at all. (Full guides on linen handling and disinfection requirements are coming to this Knowledge Base.)
The worked example — a 90-bed skilled-nursing facility
| Licensed beds | 90 |
| Planning census | 95% ≈ 86 residents |
| Pounds per resident per day | 12 lb |
| Daily poundage | 86 × 12 ≈ 1,030 lb/day, 7 days a week |
| Processing window | 8 hours |
| Required throughput | 1,030 ÷ 8 ≈ 129 lb/hour |
| Washers | 129 ÷ 1.3 ≈ 99 lb required → two 60-lb washer-extractors (flatwork, redundancy) + one 25–30 lb washer (personal clothing) |
| Dryers | (129 ÷ 1.5) × 1.4 ≈ 120 lb required → two 75-lb dryers (150 lb, with headroom) |
The third, smaller washer isn't padding — it's what keeps personal clothing moving in proper resident-separated batches without stealing a big machine from the flatwork line, and it's a working spare when a large unit is down.
What moves the numbers
- Acuity mix. A memory-care wing or a higher-acuity census pushes per-resident poundage toward the top of the table.
- Personal laundry policy. In-house personal clothing service adds volume and small-batch complexity; family-managed laundry removes it.
- Multiple buildings. One central laundry versus per-building equipment changes the whole lineup — and the cart logistics.
- Utilities. Gas versus electric drying, hot-water capacity, and the electrical service available in the laundry room often decide the shortlist before capacity does.
When to bring Arrow in
The math gets you a credible lineup; the building and the survey requirements decide the rest. Arrow Machinery has equipped and serviced on-premise laundries for care facilities across Oklahoma, NW Arkansas, and the Texas Panhandle since 1959 — including large community operations like the Salvation Army and Choctaw Nation. Send us your bed count and care mix, and we'll come back with a machine-by-machine plan and a real quote.