The Dyson Airblade – Changing The Way Hand Dryers Work
The latest generation of Dyson hand dryers have single-handedly propelled electric hand dryers into the 20th century. For years, there was no major innovation in terms of how hand dryers worked – that is, until companies like Dyson, Nova and ASI decided to push the technology in a new direction. Originally put up for retail in the UK in 2006, the Dyson Airblade was introduced to the United States by Dyson B2B Inc. in 2007, and is currently the only product in the US that is NSF Certified under the Hygenic Commercial Hand Dryer specification. Instead of emitting a wide jet of warm air, the Dyson Airblade uses a thin sheet of unheated air traveling at 400 miles per hour to practically ‘wipe’ your hands dry. It takes Dyson hand dryers all of 10 seconds to dry your hands, and that at 80% less the electrical consumption of conventional machines.
What makes the Dyson Airblade so much more efficient than the common hand dryer is because it the fact that it does not use power-hungry heating elements to warm the air that dries your hands. It’s well known that electrical appliances that incorporate heating elements consume the most energy – it’s the reason that a simple toasted or kettle can short your entire circuit board. They’re also slow to work. Conventional heated air dryers are generally perceived to be too slow (relative to, say, wiping your hands will with a paper towel) as they take as much as 27 seconds to work. The Dyson Airblade is so uncannily fast because it uses sheets of cold air that ‘wipe’ your hands like a windshield wiper. That faster drying means higher savings on electric consumption – though of course, even were the machine to run for the same period of time as a traditional convection-heating drier, it would use only a third to a quarter of that machine’s energy. Aside from that, the designers of Dyson hand dryers have, it seems, also solved the problem of noisy hand dryers, incorporating an acoustically insulated casing that actually reduces noise.
One of the major criticisms about hand dryers in general is that they’ve been shown, under laboratory conditions, to increase bacteria by as much as 194% rather than decrease them as paper towels are said to do. This is because conventional hand dryers create just enough airflow to remove only a bit of water from your hands while evaporating the rest with the warm air. Studies show that conventional dryers cannot filter bacteria from the washroom air, and that warm air in fact spreads micro-organisms as much as 0.25 meters from the dryer. However, Dyson hand driers emit cold air, and have been shown by the Institut de Recherche Microbiologique (IRM), a French test lab that specializes on the study of microbial agents, to reduce contamination by as much as 89.5%. This is because the Dyson Airblade has a HEPA filter that captures and eliminates up to 99.9% of the bacteria in the air it uptakes before it reaches your hands. Along with this nifty feature, its no touch operation results in reduced contamination and, in fact, almost complete bacteria elimination. That’s good news for proponents of the power-saving qualities of electric hand dryers.
Compared to paper towels, Dyson hand dryers are both more economical and more environmentally friendly, because they are less expensive in terms of operation and maintenance and don’t generate landfill waste the way paper towels do. Indeed, the net energy usage required to produce and dispose of one paper towel costs about as much as the drying of 22 pairs of hands with the Dyson Airblade? What those figures amount to is a truck-load of saving and drastically reduced carbon footprints for you, your employees, and your organization.
