A Gusty Guide To Hand Dryer Types
There has been a surprising proliferation of hand dryer design types in recent years. Here is a guide to some of the most popular kinds of hand dryer in use today.
Blade Hand Dryers
Blade-style hand dryers originated in Japan. The Mitsubishi industrial group produced the AirTowel during the 1990s, which fit in neatly with the rise of high-tech bathrooms in the economically powerful Asian nation as it was experiencing a massive engineering boom. Blade-type hand dryers contain compact digital motors behind two or more ‘ribs’. The shape of these ribs is significant in the operation of the dryer. They channel the air pushed out by the motors into very thin ‘panes’. These panes of air are capable of drying hands very quickly. More importantly for business owners, blade dryers are very cheap to run, because they require far less time and a smaller volume of air to dry a pair of hands in comparison with other kinds of system. They also do not need to have a heating element: cold air will suffice. This makes them very cheap to run. Cold air hand dryers are also far more hygienic than hot air hand dryers. In the UK, companies like Blow Motion make blade-type hand dryers.
Push-Button Hand Dryers
Push-button hand dryers are still remarkably common in bathrooms around the country. The reasons why this legacy technology is still in use are unit cost and maintenance simplicity. Push-button hand dryers – as the name might suggest – are activated by a bathroom user by pushing a button. This is usually a simple circuit connecting switch that activates the dryer for a set amount of time. Push-button hand dryers are not exactly the most hygienic way to remove moisture from a hand. Germs that have not been eradicated in the washing of hands may be transferred onto the button, leading to possible transfer of disease.
Automatic Hand Dryers
Automatic hand dryers are now largely replacing push-button models in public bathrooms across the UK. These hand dryers use an infrared sensor to detect the passing of a hand across a set space. Then the infrared beam sent out by the sensor is broken, the dryer will run. Although these designs are more hygienic than push-button models, they also tend to be slightly more complex to maintain, meaning that companies cannot rely upon janitors to make simple repairs and must call in specialists from the company that provided the dryers in the first place.
High-Speed Hand Dryers
High-speed ‘jet’ hand dryers are relatively popular but tend to be quite expensive to run. They are not the result of any particular technological advancement. Instead, they simply pack a more powerful punch – using a powerful motor to blast hot air into the hands of a bathroom user. Although they dry hands more quickly, they do so at an increased cost due to the high power of the motors inside. They may also be more vulnerable to regular malfunctions.
There you have it: a guide to the different types of hand dryers.