The electric air-dryer industry has been attempting to disrupt the use of paper towels in public lavatories for decades, so many decades that now new air-dryer tech has come along to disrupt the air-dryers!
The maker of the Dyson Airblade dB wants you to know their hand dryer “Scrapes away water. At 420mph.” Well, here’s why the Dyson Airblade model dB is annoying: It scrapes away water from your hands at 420 mph, as if that’s the only place you might need water removed. Sometimes you enter a public lavatory with a need to wash not only your hands, but also your face, and sometimes even your pits. Any body regions beyond the aforementioned we are assigning to an Extreme Emergency Situation beyond the scope of this Argument.
So, if you are in a public lavatory with only a Dyson Airblade dB for the drying-off of water from washing, you can’t do like Madonna is doing here in this dot-gif from the Major Motion Picture Desperately Seeking Susan. You can’t wash up at a public lavatory and then dry your face and maybe your pits.
The 420mph geniuses at Dyson decided that the only lavar people do in lavatories is their hands, and they would only ever wash their hands up to a few inches past their wrists. They designed a little mini-stockade, where you are invited to try and insert your clean hands without touching the sides of an opening where zillions of others have inserted their hands, and who knows how good they were at washing? Not as good at it as you, probably, right?
And forget it if you have clothing on your arms approaching your hands, there’s no way you’re getting your hands in to the drying area without touching stuff with your clothing, so that means if you have on a heavy sweater, you need to partially disrobe or, using your soaking-wet hands, push your sweater sleeves up so you can get into the Dyson’s air-hole without touching anything. You might as well just dry your hands on your sweater, at least you know where it’s been.
Look at this image of a serving suggestion from Dyson’s web site. The model is accomplishing drying maybe 80 percent of hand surface. If you put your hand deeper into the area of operation, you end up touching stuff. The whole efficiency model of this is for the Machine, not the person. What happens is you get so fed up using the thing you give up and walk away with less than 100 percent hand in the dry category, and then the Machine gets to rest. The Dyson site claims “Dry hands in 12 seconds⁺” with a footnote stating:
⁺Dry time determined using Dyson test method 769 based on NSF P335 using a measurement of 0.1g residual moisture.
OK, sure. In our case we counted to 25-Mississipi and the dryer shut off, so we extracted our hands, waited a few seconds, and continued on for another 10-Mississippi until our hands were legit all the way dry. We thought maybe we were doing it wrong, and there might be a way to get max dry from a side-entry strategy, so we tried inserting our wet mitts from the side, but going in that way doesn’t activate the sensor that will unleash the 420.
The Dyson V, pictured below is more like a normal hand dryer. You have a sporting chance at face and pit drying, but it’s not exactly convenient.
Getting back to the Dyson Airblade dB, the name is interesting because unless they are proud of how loud this thing is, adding the abbreviation for decibels to the name of the appliance is an error. The journal Noise & Health reported a study of hand dryers measured at noise levels from 80 to 91dB , and “confirmed what many have commented on anecdotally: These dryers are loud.”
Our informal and non-scientific test at the wine bar near our house (one glass of a nice dry Riesling, thanks for asking), involving a single Dyson Airblade dB, measured with the dB Meter Pro app on our phone produced a result of 87-97 dB, or “Power tools” level, compared to say, 38 dB for “Quiet library,” so yeah, the Dyson dB is fucking loud.
Meanwhile, we live in fear of seeing a DYSON label nearby when we’re sitting on a public toilet.
