Xlerators are an auditory health hazard. You can hear them running outside the gym before you can hear the music blaring.

All hand dryers are a health hazard. They're a wet, warm, bacteria incubator that can then aerosolize the bacteria.

In contrast, the mechanical action of drying your hands with a paper towel is an additional antibacterial step.

Why do you imagine that normal hands dryers are wet? The original Dyson airblades? Sure. Those are gross. Normal air dryers don’t have anywhere to store water, and if somehow you got water inside, it would rapidly dry itself out from normal use.

I had to read all of 4 sentences to see that this does not say that air dryers are growing bacteria. In fact it says the opposite, that there was very little bacteria in the nozzles. There is bacteria in the air and the dryers are sucking it in and pushing it onto hands being dried.

False.

The emerging research showing hearing damage to children, who stand closer and lower in to the air blower, is pretty damning.

I'll pretty much never use these if I can avoid it. Paper towel is quick, it's quiet, it's mess free, and it's made out of a renewable resource that pulls CO2 from the air. What's not to like about paper towels?

Brought to light with some nice work by a junior researcher recently, https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739783918/hand-dryers-harm-ch...

I wipe my hands on my pants.

I can’t stand that noise those Dyson Airblade makes, it’s just as unpleasant as the Xlerator’s and I generally avoid bathrooms with either hand dryer.

Normal models may be slower, but the only way they are taking 60 seconds if it’s broken or you never move your hands.

Maybe because they were bold enough to make the trade-off. In a competition hand dryer that doesn't really work vs one that damages your hearing... I'll keep wet hands thanks.

That damages your hearing? Surely there must be a space between. Long time ago in a McDonald's in Poland I used one that would dry your hands in 5 seconds flat. It was powerful and loud, but only as loud as a blender. Which is loud, but not painful or damaging to ears...

EDIT: it looked similar to this one:

https://www.qbicwashrooms.co.uk/magnum-multidry-hand-dryer-w...

Except it had even lower power rating. I don't get why this states "25 seconds". Do people have hands made from sponge?

> I don't get why this states "25 seconds". Do people have hands made from sponge?

I don’t know why 25 seconds is hard to believe. That’s the manufacturer’s claim. I’d imagine if anything their claim is optimistic and the 60 seconds people claim is more realistic.

If you have washed your hands properly, you’ll have several milliliters of water spread across the surface. Slow blowing warm air isn’t going to dry that off in 5 seconds.

There was this TED talk once about shaking your hands twice to only need one towel. I've been doing it ever since and an Airblade will dry my hands in 10 seconds.

It's 12 times and leaves quite a mess

That's what the sink is for.

Yeah, I apparently misremembered the number (I guess I'm lazy to go for 2-3 usually, but I think it's the 20% effort that gets you 80% there). And I never had a mess cause I do it over the sink.

Only it was twelve times.

Thank you, I guess I misremembered. But 2-3 times works for me.

> I don’t know why 25 seconds is hard to believe.

Because it's 2.5 kilowatt blower making 78 dB of noise, according to the technical spec under that link. With these parameters, you should be able to dry your hands in 5 seconds while keeping them a meter away. Like with the one I mentioned seeing in that McDonald's, which was AFAIR rated at something around 1.2 kW (and I remember thinking that's already impressive for a hand dryer).

> Slow blowing warm air isn’t going to dry that off in 5 seconds.

But fast blowing, slightly less warm air would.

I was subtly suggesting that the reason may be what 'carlmr mentioned in a parallel reply - maybe people don't shake off the water after washing their hands, preferring instead to both waste their time at the dryer and add work to the cleaning stuff that now has extra water to mop off the floor?

> Because it's 2.5 kilowatt blower making 78 dB of noise, according to the technical spec under that link. With these parameters, you should be able to dry your hands in 5 seconds while keeping them a meter away.

This is a really bizarre statement. You throw some numbers up and then say “obviously it should work how I said”. But it’s not obvious at all. Those numbers don’t intuitively tell me that it should my hands in 5 seconds. Indeed my intuition (and that manufacturer’s specs) says that’s wildly inaccurate.

I’m really confused by your “1 meter away” claim. At a meter away you’re basically just waiting for ambient air to dry your hands. The fact that they measure decibels a meter away doesn’t mean that’s where your hands should be.

My statement is this: I've used a sub-2kW blower that could dry hands in below 10 seconds, was loud but not painful, and if you somehow made it portable, it could double as a leaf blower in a pinch. 1 meter from the nozzle the stream was still powerful enough to dry hands faster than ambient air. So the numbers people throw around this thread are weird, they imply unrealisticly wet hands, or ridiculously inefficient dryers.

I think the fact that your numbers are so much drastically lower than the manufacturer’s numbers indicates that your numbers are not representative of the typical experience. Maybe you can dry your hands in five seconds with the typical air dryer. It’s clearly not true for most people. Maybe you shake your hands extremely dry before going to the dryer. Maybe after using the dryer your hands are still wet and clammy. I don’t know. Your experiences are clearly not reflective of the typical case, though.

All I know is that Dyson hand dryers and Animal vacuum cleaners are well above my pain threshold. I think using them regularly certainly would damage my hearing. I actively avoid them.

It's down to diversity, I suppose. I'm no super-hearer (I don't really think my hearing is different to anyone else's) but obviously the engineers at Dyson didn't care about people like me.

I use another brand of 'blade' type dryers (I forget which) every day and it's fine.

Sorry, it's not false. I dried my hands using an Airblade V2 on Saturday in a services washroom. I timed it. It took 32 seconds. I did the same when using another make (when I was at PyconUK, in Cardiff city hall, feel free to check them out), and it took 30 seconds.

Was the other drying one that used a similar design as Dyson's Airblade or something that predates it? Because the parent was talking about the state of the art for hand dryers before Dyson and I concur with them, it was pretty shit. On the other hand I wouldn't be surprised if other vendors these days managed to clone Dyson's design and even improve on it.

I don't get the times in this thread. 30 seconds is still ridiculously long. I could dry my hands with a hair dryer at minimum setting faster than that. On Dyson ones I used I could dry my hands in under 15 seconds. How are you people drying your hands?

I don't get the craze for those fastest but actually slow hand dryers I dry them on jeans pockets and it takes two seconds top

You should consider that perhaps everyone else isn’t crazy. Dyson claims 12 seconds. Undoubtedly that is optimistic and many people will find it takes longer if they aren’t doing it exactly the way Dyson expects.

Personally I like the new air blades but also don’t find that they fully dry my hands. They get most of the water off and I move in with life. If I wanted my hands towel dry, I’m pretty sure I’d need more than 12 seconds.