Are you a heavy LPG gas consumer or do you simply use it to make breakfast in the morning or warm up something once in a while?

Premier Gas, a cooking gas dealer, recently launched Pima Gas, a cooking gas dispenser that will allow people to refill their cylinders with LPG for as little as KES 50. The Pima Gas cylinder, with a storage capacity of 1 KG, will cost KES 2, 000 to buy  ( with a fulll tank, a stand and a burner) and KES 300 to refill. Compared to KES 1,600 and KES 3,300 it costs to refill the 6kg and 13Kg cylinders respectively, being able to buy gas for as little as KES 50 will definitely come in handy for the 'kadogo' economy, and the occasional bachelor whose gas runs out when 'mwezi imepiga kona'

However, is the Pima gas initiative  as cost effective as we'd like to believe?

The graph below shows the total cost of running the different sizes of cylinder (1kg, 6kg, and 13kg) over the first 12 months of owning each. We have taken the costs of buying a new cylinder, and the cost of refilling each.

Here we see that below 7 kgs of use/month, the Pima gas cylinder makes sense. However, beyond that, it become cheaper to buy the 6 kg cylinder until you get to 20KGs per month. We believe anyone using more than 20Kgs of LPG in a month left the 'individual consumer' group quite a number of kilos back.