Hand dryers, scarers of children

September 15, 2016 0 Comments twitter, kids, hand dryers

Being a parent teaches you a bunch of things, especially if, like me, you're father to a daughter. It teaches you that mens toilets anywhere are disgusting places, particularly for small children to relieve themselves, and blokes in general are gross. It teaches you lots of new things about hair, like that it can take more than 2 minutes to do. It teaches you fascinating things about males and females are 'wired up' differently right from the start. Parenting can be a joy, but also a formidable challenge.

It also teaches you that hand dryers are TERRIFYING to little people.

Hand dryers have evolved a lot of late, not just with new entrants like the Dyson Airblade, but a host of other makes with names like AIRFORCE, HURRICANE, SKIN PEELER (OK, I made some of those up). The general design principle when making a hand dryer seems to be make it as fast as possible, as high power as possible and unfortunately... as LOUD as possible.

My daughter was, and to a degree still is at 12 years old, terrified of the beasts. Hand towels in a bathroom would be greeted with a cry of joy... A particularly violent dryer with cries of despair and (wet) hands over the ears. The loudest ones are always placed where they're most likely to be accidentally activated too!

I'd love to throw down the gauntlet to the likes of James Dyson to engineer an effective, yet muted, dryer suitable for installation in noise sensitive environments (anywhere kids go? ) or for noise sensitive clients. I'm no expert, but this should be possible, right, or at the very least some improvement can be made on today's monsters.

Think of the children! 😊

Paul O'Brien
Paul O'Brien
Norwich, Norfolk
IT Director, founder, dad, writer, snowboarder, gooner, mobile / cloud / Linux expert. Striving to bridge the gap between tech & humans.