The fact is that any school still using paper towels in its washrooms is throwing away a substantial amount of money, every day.
As an example, here is a very simple calculation (which errs on the side of caution): every school bursar should do this for their own school!
Number of UK school days: 195
Number of times each child uses the toilets per day: 3
Number of paper towels used on average per visit: 2
Cost per paper towel: 1p
Number of pupils using a washroom: 50
So the cost of using paper towels per year for those 50 pupils is:
195 days x 3 uses x 2 paper towels x £0.01 x 50 pupils = £585 per year.
The running costs of a modern hand dryer for the same level of usage is approximately £50, which means the payback period of a hand dryer in this type of situation is 6 months.
And additional costs, such as the costs of clearing up the mess caused by the combination of young children and paper towels, and unblocking drains (we recently heard of a school with a £6,000 annual bill just for drain unblocking!) etc will all be additional savings.
But there are considerations to bear in mind when choosing the right dryer for schools, because on top of the usual selection criteria of efficiency, maintenance, etc, there are three criteria which are particularly important:
Noise levels
Modern hand dryers are noisy – that’s just something we need to accept, because to be efficient and quick, they need to propel huge amounts of air over our hands, and that means running the motors at very high speeds. However, not all dryers are as noisy as others, and this is particularly important for young children – they are often scared of the noise of hand dryers and we have seen situations where children refuse to use the hand dryer because of this. Without boring you with the details of how hand dryer noise levels are measured (we do that in another article) we would recommend that you do not use a hand dryer in a Primary school which has a decibel rating of more than 76 dBA.
Vandalism
In any school environment, regardless of the age of the pupils, hand dryers need to be robust, capable of receiving a few knocks, and difficult to remove from the wall by adventurous children! On certain dryers, you will find features such as tamper-resistant screws, ABS casings, and auto-cut out (so the dryer cannot run for more than a certain length of time) etc. Choosing a fully automatic dryer is also a good idea, so the pupils are not required to come in contact with it.
Environmental Learning
Some manufacturers (notably Biodrier) have realised that if a school is using a hand dryer, there is an opportunity for the children to understand the environmental impact of doing so, and as well as interesting splashboards, they also provide some learning materials which can be used by the school to help with this.
Clearly, some of these criteria will be more important than others, and will depend on the ages of the children concerned, but from either an environmental or cost point of view, it is pretty clear that if you are a school still using paper towels you should probably investigate the use of hand dryers pretty quickly – it could have a big impact on your budget.
We have collected together our recommended hand dryers for schools: you can find them by clicking here, but if you need to talk through your particular requirements or just check that the hand dryers you have chosen are right for your school, please do speak to our friendly advisors on 01934 253600.
