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So, last night we heard that Dyson was revolutionising the way we wash our hands with a fancy new Airblade Tap that blasts your hands dry after you’ve sanitised yourself. Today, Dyson let us have a play in its London lab, so what was it like?
I’ll get this out there from the off — this isn’t a tap for your home. Yes, you can install the thing in your bathroom, but you wouldn’t want to. It spits out a single temperature (controlled upstream), makes a load of noise, and costs £1,000 a pop. It’s designed with the commercial market in mind, and it should be great in a restaurant or museum bathroom.
The Airblade Tap senses your hands with IR without issue, pumps out the water, and then waits for you to separate your hands to kick-start the air. The Tap works in the same way as any other Airblade product, producing a blade of air that scrapes the water off your mitts rather than trying to evaporate it with heat.
In reality, it works OK, but I, and a lot of other journalists trialling this thing, found that it didn’t totally dry your hands. Sure, it got the worst off, but your hands weren’t bone dry. But then, if you think about how you use any old hand dryer, unless you’re dedicated to the cause, it’s just a quick flick and then out, not desert-dry skin. In 12 seconds, the Airblade Tap will dry your hands enough so you can jet back to your date.
The noise it makes is just like the traditional Airblade. It’s loud, but not obnoxious thanks to the acoustic tuning that Dyson’s put into action within the air chambers. That said, if you put this in your bathroom at home, the whole house would hear you drying your hands. Can’t see that really going down well at 4am.
So, it’s a tap that lets you wash your hands and dries them right at the basin. It does what it says on the tin, and it’s a pretty minimalist and stylish-looking piece of kit. Apparently the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington, London, is looking at getting them fitted, so they should be appearing in bathrooms across the country from around the summer.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-technology/weve-kind-of-got-the-wet-hands-thing-licked-humanity-tells-dyson-2013020558657 kind of sums it up nicely really
I think that article is kind of rude. Regardless of the impact the product will have, it’s still innovation. It’s still (probably) better than the current solution.
So fuck the Daily Mash. Who ever the fuck they are.
Someone doesn’t realise The Mash is a satirical news website…
Oh, yeah, once I realised that it was a joke site … I died laughing at the humour.
The Daily Mash is a satirical website.
See my comment above ^
The Daily Mash is a spoof site which takes the piss out of everything, with a good dose of actual truth.
Dyson has combined a tap and the airblade. It’s not crazy innovation, but I’m sure it could be useful-ish. It doesn’t excite me.
I
would be good in motorway service stations and cinemas where queuing for the hand dryer is a game of awkward silence and avoiding eye contact..
The article is stupid. Dyson is innovating in this segment of the market to make a profit out of it while adding convenience to customers. Dyson’s aim is not to cure cancer or fend of wars, one of their objectives (other than hoovers etc) is to dry hands quickly and efficiently, and they’re doing just that.
Haha, Daily Mash is a parody-news website. It’s not ment to be taken seriously.
You guys know that the Daily Mash write joke articles right!? Like, completely made up (usually)…
Sam, having seen the video on the BBC website of their reporter trying to use it, did you hold your hands anywhere near the bars or, as he seemed to be doing, well down in the basin on the edge of the sensor range?
Technical question I know, but the original AirBlade was always designed to squeegee your hands to a certain level of water on the skin (just without the warm feeling that you have from a traditional hand drier), I suppose that without the constraint of the other half of the drier as you’d have with the original AirBlade it’s not as easy to guarantee that people are holding their hands in the correct position.
About 5cm off the bars, worked fine. And yes, it works like a windscreen wiper, but you have to flip your hands over to do both sides.
The BBC bloke obviously has never used an Airblade, or is trying to make a stupid point. You have to do it much slower than that, and be closer. It’s really not hard. Anyone who’s come across an Airblade will understand immediately.
I think it was the former tbh, he certainly wasn’t sure what he was doing. One way of combating that would be to reduce the sensor range so that you have to hold your hands close enough for it to be effective.
Either way, it looks to be a useful combination of the two technologies, and also opens up space for either more wash basins or similar capacity in a smaller space
I’m still waiting for the sonic shower.
How about a shower-sized AirBlade?
Finish showering and it runs from neck* to toe squeegeeing the water off you
*Anything higher up and the risk assessment will never get approved.
Well, I’m not entirely confident about having something like that whooshing around my flappy bits.
This is why i dislike hand dryers (apart from the germs argument) I’m not so keen on wandering about with briefly warm but nonetheless damp hands.
What about soap?
Yeah, you still have to bring your own soap.
Dammit Jim! Pickup your own soap!
Kudos to J Dyson, he’s been pumping out (no pun intended) innovative products for years, but the real innovation here is that he managed to get a lot of buzz over washing your hands. Don’t get me wrong, I think it looks cool and I’m pretty sure it’ll be the bees knees, but it takes a special talent to get something as pedestrian as a tap/hand drier combo onto everyone’s news blogs.
)
(don’t take that as a criticism, Giz: I’m not saying it’s not news and I’m not saying I didn’t want to read about it…
Yeah, it’s kind of like the emperor’s new clothes & everyone is afraid to say something….. No-one was this excited when I invented the camera phone:
http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lle1azjT4n1qf69euo1_400.jpg
You might be on to something there. Can you make the camera front facing though?
Yeah, you just turn it around.
Thousands of years of human invention and I still have to wipe my own ass???
C’mom Dyson sort it out!
The Japanese have had this sorted for some time with their cool electronic toilets.
So this would be a bidet? Heh
Bidets still require you stick your hand where the sun don’t shine. They’ve got toilets that will rinse your arsenal with water and then blow dry it for you
Nice use of arsenal there
“Hands on…”
Beautifully executed pun Sam.
What ever happened to just not washing your hands?
Its not innovation, many a time I have turned the hot tap on, washed my hands, the water getting too hot and then having to blow on my hands to cool them down.