Most hotel kitchens are sized for the average week. They run out of gas on the unusual one. The Saturday a wedding takes over the ballroom while the all-day buffet still runs. The week the boiler is offline and the chef plans every meal around the gas range. The Christmas season when occupancy doubles and the kitchen is open from 06:00 to midnight. These are the moments storage sizing matters. The other 48 weeks of the year, you can almost get away with anything.
Here is how we think about it at Bomart when we are designing or auditing a storage system for a hotel client. Three rules, two common mistakes, six questions for your prospective vendor.
Rule 1. Size from peak demand, not average demand.
Your average daily LPG burn is the wrong number to design around. Calculate it for context, but design for the busiest realistic 72-hour window of the year. For a typical 100-room hotel with full F&B (breakfast, lunch buffet, dinner service, room service, banquets), peak burn is usually 2.5x to 3x average daily burn. A property that averages 80 kg/day on a normal week should size storage for at least 240 kg/day in peak.
The simple way to estimate: walk the kitchen, list every gas-fired appliance with its rated input in BTU/hr or kW, multiply by realistic peak hours per day, sum, convert to kg of LPG. Add 20% for hot-water boilers or process heat if applicable. Round up.
Rule 2. Build in a delivery-cadence buffer.
You do not refill on demand. You refill on a schedule, with a delivery latency that depends on your supplier's logistics, traffic, and seasonal pressure. A reasonable rule for the Lagos–Ibadan corridor: assume 4–7 days between scheduled deliveries, plus a 2-day buffer for unexpected delays. So your usable storage should hold roughly 9 days of peak burn at minimum.
Concretely: if your peak daily burn is 240 kg, you want at least 240 × 9 = 2,160 kg of usable storage. LPG vessels are typically rated at 85% fill capacity for safety, so the gross tank size you specify is more like 2,540 kg, or about 5,100 litres of vessel volume. Most hotels in this band end up with one 5-ton underground tank or two 2.5-ton above-ground vessels.
Rule 3. Account for the site, not just the burn.
The burn calculation tells you the volume. The site tells you what is actually deployable. Three constraints we always check:
- Standoff distances. NMDPRA and DPR rules govern minimum distances between LPG vessels and ignition sources, occupied buildings, and property boundaries. The minimum standoff for a 5-ton vessel from an occupied building is meaningfully larger than for a 2-ton. The right tank is sometimes the smaller tank.
- Refill access. The bridger or bobtail has to physically reach the fill point. Tight courtyards, low overhangs, and shared service drives turn into expensive engineering problems if not surveyed before purchase.
- Yard hardstand & bunding. Above-ground storage needs hardstand, bunding for spill containment, and a clear approach. Underground storage avoids the yard footprint but adds installation cost and excavation surveying.
The right LPG storage system for a hotel kitchen is not the one with the most capacity. It is the one with enough capacity to never embarrass your kitchen team, sized to your actual peak, and installed in a way that the bridger can reach on a wet Tuesday in July.
Two common mistakes.
Mistake 1: Sizing only for daily average. Architect's brief specifies "kitchen serves 100 covers, average 60 kg/day". Vendor sizes a 1-ton vessel. Fine for the first eight months. Fails on the December when occupancy hits 95% and the buffet runs all day. Customer blames the vendor. The vendor was right against the brief, and the brief was wrong.
Mistake 2: Buying maximum capacity without checking deployability. Owner wants "bigger than we will ever need" — orders a 10-tonne vessel for a property that only needs 4. The bridger cannot reach the fill point because the standoff radius now overlaps the service drive. The site requires earthworks. The cost overruns. Smaller would have been better.
Six questions to ask any LPG vendor before signing.
- What is your monthly fill cadence and minimum order? If their minimum is too high, you over-buy. If too low, you over-pay per kg. The sweet spot matches your delivery-cadence buffer.
- What is your delivery latency from order to truck-on-site? A vendor who quotes "next-day" but actually delivers in 5 days is a vendor who will, eventually, run your kitchen out of gas.
- Can you commit to a published per-tonne price, with quarterly review windows? The price should be the price. If the vendor refuses to publish, that is the answer.
- Is your fleet GPS-tracked, and will I get visibility? A vendor who cannot tell you where the bridger is at 11:00 cannot tell you why the delivery is late at 14:00.
- What is your incident-response SLA? Leak, regulator failure, equipment defect — what is the response time, and is it written into the contract?
- Will you supply a single named operations contact? Not a call centre, not a generic email. A person who knows your account, returns calls within the hour, and is responsible for your kitchen running.
If your hotel is in Lagos, Ibadan, or anywhere along the corridor, and you would like a free site walk-through and storage sizing estimate, send a note to info@bomartworld.com. We do not charge for the survey. The proposal you receive will include the sizing maths, the site constraints, and a commitment on per-tonne pricing.
— The Bomart Plant Design & Build team