Being able to choose a fast hand dryer is a fairly recent luxury. Older electric dryers were slow enough that most people gave up and wiped their hands on their trousers on the way out. There is no need to put up with that now.
The catch is that every manufacturer on this page claims a drying time between 8 and 10 seconds, and there is no single standard they all test against. Taken at face value, the numbers say every dryer here is equally fast, which is plainly not true.
Air speed is the honest measure, and it varies enormously. The JETBOX Blade moves air at 201 m/s. The Dolphin BC230 moves it at 30 m/s. Both are listed at 10 seconds.
The fastest airflow we stock
- JETBOX Blade at 201 m/s and 70dB, the fastest air on the page and quiet with it.
- Dyson Airblade 9kJ at 192 m/s, hands-under, built for constant use.
- Dyson Airblade AB14 at 192 m/s, the hands-in original, though the loudest here at 81dB.
- Stream Hygiene 3G at 166 m/s, a lower-cost route to genuinely fast drying.
Fast usually means loud
The two figures move together, so the real decision is how much noise the room can take. A washroom off a restaurant floor or an open-plan office is a different problem from one in a motorway services.
The JETBOX Blade is the exception worth knowing about: top of the range on air speed and still 70dB, because the hands-in casing contains the noise. If quiet matters more than throughput, start with our quiet hand dryers instead, or the hands-in range.
