What Does It Really Cost to Power a Lagos Shortlet? Diesel vs Band A, Per Guest-Night (2026)

The short answer: powering a two-bedroom Lagos shortlet costs roughly ₦9,000 to ₦18,000 per occupied night in 2026, depending on your electricity band and how many hours your generator runs. On a ₦120,000 nightly rate that is 8% to 15% of revenue — typically more than you spend on cleaning, and almost always the largest variable cost in the business. Generator power costs roughly ₦490 to ₦610 per kWh against about ₦225 per kWh on Band A, so every hour you shift from generator to grid is worth about 60% of that hour's energy bill.

Nigerian hosts track cleaning fees to the last naira and then write "diesel" in a notebook. This article fixes that, with the actual arithmetic.

The formula

Everything below comes from one calculation:

Cost per hour = litres consumed per hour × price per litre
Cost per kWh = litres per hour ÷ kW actually delivered × price per litre

As of August 2026, diesel is around ₦1,660 per litre nationally, with real pump prices ranging from about ₦1,600 to ₦1,950 depending on state and marketer. Petrol runs roughly ₦1,100 to ₦1,200. Diesel is fully deregulated, so it moves with crude and the exchange rate — re-run these numbers quarterly, not annually.

What your generator costs per hour

Figures below assume a generator running at about 75% load, which is where most shortlet gensets actually sit with air conditioning on. A lightly loaded generator burns less fuel per hour but more fuel per unit of electricity, so running an oversized set on a low load is worse value than the table suggests.

Generator	Fuel	Approx. litres/hour	Cost per hour	Cost per kWh
3.5 kVA	Petrol	~1.2	~₦1,380	~₦490
5 kVA	Diesel	~1.3	~₦2,160	~₦540
10 kVA	Diesel	~2.6	~₦4,320	~₦540
15 kVA	Diesel	~3.8	~₦6,310	~₦525
20 kVA	Diesel	~5.0	~₦8,300	~₦520

Two things fall out of this table that surprise most hosts.

First: bigger generators are slightly cheaper per unit of electricity, not more expensive. If you share a 10 kVA between four units in a block, each unit's share of an hour is about ₦1,080 — substantially cheaper than each unit running its own 3.5 kVA at ₦1,380 an hour. Shared generation is a real saving, provided the running hours are actually shared.

Second: the small petrol generator is not the economical option. It is the cheapest to buy and among the most expensive to run per kWh. Hosts choose it on capital cost and then pay for that choice every night for years.

What the grid costs

Band A customers — those on feeders promised 20 or more hours of supply daily, about 15% of Nigerian electricity customers — pay around ₦225 per kWh under the current NERC-approved rate, though individual DisCos have at times set theirs lower. Lower bands pay less per unit but receive dramatically fewer hours, which pushes them onto the generator, where they pay more than double per kWh. The cheap tariff is not the cheap outcome.

Put plainly:

Source	Cost per kWh	Relative
Band A grid	~₦225	Baseline
Diesel generator	~₦520–540	~2.4× the grid
Petrol generator	~₦490	~2.2× the grid

Independent analyses of Nigerian energy costs put captive diesel generation around ₦600 per kWh once maintenance and depreciation are included — so if anything the table above understates it. Servicing, oil changes, rewinding and eventual replacement are real costs that never appear in the fuel notebook.

The number that matters: cost per guest-night

Now combine them. These scenarios assume a furnished two-bedroom with two air conditioners, a fridge, a water pump and lighting — averaging around 2 kW of draw while guests are in residence.

Scenario	Grid	Generator	Est. cost per occupied night
Band A area, reliable supply	~20 hrs (~40 kWh)	~2 hrs on a shared 10 kVA	~₦9,000
Band A area, typical Lekki reality	~14 hrs (~28 kWh)	~8 hrs on a shared 10 kVA	~₦15,000
Lower band, own 3.5 kVA petrol set	~10 hrs (~20 kWh)	~8 hrs dedicated	~₦15,500
Poor supply, own 5 kVA diesel set	~6 hrs (~12 kWh)	~12 hrs dedicated	~₦28,000

Against a ₦120,000 nightly rate, that is between 8% and 23% of gross revenue going to electricity. For comparison, a typical Lagos turnover cleaning runs a fraction of that — and yet cleaning is the cost most hosts can quote from memory while power is the one they estimate.

Note too that this is a per occupied night cost. An empty unit still draws standby power but nothing like this. Which means power cost scales with occupancy, and any pricing model that ignores it will overstate the value of a cheap booking. A ₦45,000 desperation rate on a slow Tuesday looks like ₦45,000 of revenue. After power and cleaning it may be closer to ₦25,000, and it just cost you the ability to accept a better-paying enquiry.

Should you go solar or inverter?

The maths is more favourable than it was, but do it properly rather than on vibes. The method:

1. Get a real quote for an inverter, battery and panel setup sized to your unit's actual overnight load. Air conditioning is what makes this expensive — a system that runs fans, fridge, lights and sockets costs a fraction of one that runs two ACs all night.
2. Divide the installed cost by the realistic service life of the battery, which is the component that dies first. Be conservative.
3. Divide that annual figure by your expected occupied nights. Lagos runs at roughly 45% median occupancy — about 164 booked nights a year — so do not amortise over 365.
4. Compare that per-night figure against the generator hours it actually replaces, not against your whole energy bill. Most hybrid setups displace overnight running while the generator still covers daytime AC load.

The honest framing: a system that lets you turn the generator off between 11pm and 6am is usually the one that pays back, because those are the hours with the worst cost-to-benefit — you are burning ₦2,000 an hour of diesel largely to run two air conditioners and a fridge for sleeping guests, and it is also the noise that shows up in reviews.

Once a few months of that are logged, the floor rate below stops being a guess. Nookpal shows revenue and expenses per unit in naira over a period, so you can see what an occupied night actually cost you last quarter before deciding what to accept this one.

Turning this into a pricing decision

Three practical moves:

• Set a floor rate that clears power plus cleaning plus commission. If your all-in variable cost on an occupied night is ₦25,000 and your channel takes 15%, a ₦45,000 booking nets you under ₦13,000. Know your floor before you negotiate, especially in low season.
• Charge for what power actually buys you. "24/7 power, no generator noise at night" is one of the strongest differentiators available to a Nigerian listing, and guests will pay for it. If you are carrying the cost, put it in the listing title and price accordingly — do not absorb it silently.
• Log fuel against the unit, not the portfolio. A single "diesel" line for six units tells you nothing. Logged per unit, you can see which apartment is quietly unprofitable because its AC is old or its generator is oversized.

That last point is why Nookpal treats diesel and utilities as expenses attached to a specific unit rather than a general overhead. Unit-level profitability is meaningless if the largest variable cost is pooled — and in Nigerian shortlets, power is very often the largest variable cost there is.

The practical version of that is logging fuel the day you buy it, against the unit that burned it. Nookpal takes diesel, generator servicing and utilities as expenses attached to a specific unit, so the cost per occupied night above stops being an estimate from an article and becomes your own figure — and the unit whose ageing air conditioners are quietly eating the margin shows up on its own.

Assumptions, so you can adjust them

• Diesel ₦1,660/litre, petrol ₦1,150/litre (August 2026 national averages; your pump price will differ).
• Generators at ~75% load; consumption figures are typical rather than measured for your specific set.
• Band A at ₦225/kWh; check your own band and DisCo rate.
• Two-bedroom furnished unit averaging ~2 kW draw while occupied.
• Maintenance, servicing and depreciation excluded from the per-kWh figures — including them pushes generator cost higher.

Measure your own unit for one month against these and you will have something far more valuable than any benchmark: your actual cost per guest-night, which is the number your pricing should be built on.