We have thought this for a while, which is why we are now regularly producing our own, ‘distilled’ version of the manufacturers data sheets, which we hope excludes all the irrelevant data, and includes only what people need to know – and most importantly packages it in a way which is simple to understand and straightforward to compare.
How long it takes to dry someone’s hands is definitely an extremely important piece of information, but it seems that most manufacturers have been allowed to get away with a little exaggeration recently.
The number of hand dryers which are now apparently capable of delivering a ’10 second drying time’ seems to have suddenly jumped. Yet they all seem to have very different types of motor, power consumption and are moving different amounts of air at different speeds and different temperatures.
At the heart of the problem is the fact that there is no recognized standard for how to measure hand drying time, and so each manufacturer uses their own method (some more stringently than others!).
Because drying your hands is such a personal and therefore variable thing, until there is a well-defined (and used) standard, this will remain a problem.
We noticed the other day that Savortex actually record this data from their dryers, and accumulate it so they can determine the actual average drying time from empirical data – this sounds like an excellent idea, especially for managing dryers which are already installed, but is of little use for deciding which dryer to buy.
Until such functionality is widespread (which could be a while given that the Savortex dryers are amongst the most expensive in the world), it seems that we’ll have to work on the combination of the figures issued by the manufacturers, feedback from our customers and our own experiences with each dryer.
If you have been disappointed (or pleasantly surprised) with the dry time of a modern hand dryer, we’d love to hear from you!