Low energy hand dryers The market is full of Low Energy Hand Dryers – any manufacturer releasing a new product would be crazy to position their product in any other way. But is the rush for the lowest possible power consumption on a hand dryer a sensible thing?

First of all, let’s make one thing perfectly clear: all hand dryers outperform paper towels in terms of energy consumption, running costs and environmental impact on a massive scale. So if any of these criteria are important to you, then paper towels should not even be a consideration.

But the power consumption of low energy hand dryers varies greatly – from over 2000w to less than 500w. What makes the difference, and why would anyone choose a hand dryer which uses more electricity compared with one which uses less?

eco-dryers

Well, there are several good reasons, and we would advise that everyone considers the following area very carefully:

  1. "Power consumption" is not the same as how much energy is used per dry.

Why is this? Well, it is simply because it is the combination of how much power low energy hand dryers use in combination with how long they are used for that really matters. So the ‘dry time’ should be checked to make sure that the low energy hand dryer will not need to be on for twice as long. This does not just affect power consumption, it may also cause queues in high usage areas.

  1. Heater elements are bad – sometimes

Most modern hand dryers use high power jets or blades of air to scrape the water from your hands, whereas the older type of high energy hand dryers mostly use heat to evaporate the water. Removing the heater element dramatically reduces the power consumption, and only slightly reduces the dry time.

Some dryers (like the Dyson Airblade and the Warner Howard Airforce) actually take heat from the motor and use it to warm the air. This increases the comfort level but does not use any more power than is necessary.

So it would seem to make excellent sense to only use hand dryers which have no heating element. However…

  1. Heater elements are good – sometimes

Some modern low energy hand dryer manufacturers have rushed headlong for the crown of ‘lowest energy hand dryer’. Unfortunately in doing so they have produced a dryer which in many circumstances is just unpleasant to use, especially in winter. The result is that your staff or customers leave the washroom cold, miserable, and drying their hands on their jeans. Of course your electricity bill will be low, but you could save even more by not buying a hand dryer at all!

We rarely get negative feedback on any hand dryers, but “it’s too ******* cold” is certainly the most common complaint we hear: in our opinion, some manufacturers have gone too far in reducing energy consumption, and they have forgotten that the most important thing is the customer experience.

So what is our recommendation?

We have 3 pieces of advice to bear in mind when searching for the best low energy hand dryer:

  1. Don’t consider anything more than 2kW: regardless of the drying time, these will use too much energy.
  2. If you choose a dryer with no heating element, make sure it has a power consumption of at least 1kW. Any less than this and it will not be able to generate any significant heat from the motor. It will be too cold and your customers will just not use it.
  3. Consider the alternative of a hand dryer with an element which can be either switched off or adjusted up/down. This gives you the best of both worlds and allows you to have a summer/winter setting, or adjust it if your customers or staff complain about it being too hot or too cold.

We have lots of tools to help you choose the right low energy hand dryers: from Advice Centre articles like this one to downloadable e-books and online selection tools. And of course, we are always available on 01934 253600 where you can talk to one of our hand dryer experts to make sure you are buying exactly the right dryer for your requirements.