It seems fair to say that Dyson sits at the intersection of impressive engineering and borderline ridiculous products. The Dyson Airblade 9KJ hand dryer that [ElectrArc240] recently took to bits would definitely seem to fall under the latter, combining an incredible amount of engineering all for the simple task of drying wet hands.
These hand dryers are rated for a cool 900 Watts, with an 0.5 W standby power consumption, though you can also switch it to a 650 W ‘eco mode’ when installing it. The air that gets sucked into the dryer first passes through a HEPA filter before it hits the heating element and then gets blown out of the handles onto one’s hands.
Both of these handles come with a presence sensor in the form of an ST VL53L3CX time-of-flight sensor, along with a path for the heated air towards the thin slits. Returning to the section just past the HEPA filter is the compressor, with a rather fancy airflow path that involves various stacked meshes. As can be seen in the video, where you’d expect basically a simple blower motor or so, there is a truly astounding amount of parts as the teardown progresses.
The motor disassembly is the first part where some desoldering and breaking of glue bonds is really necessary, but it gives full access to the driver board. The circuit used here is your typical IGBT-based driver, though with a mystery PIC MCU to do things. Following this the tear-down turns fully destructive, giving access to the motor internals.
Following an analysis of these internals we marvel at the carbon-fiber rotor that keeps the single magnet in one piece. This is another engineering choice that serves to justify the 1,000 quid price tag. All so that rest room visitors do not have to suffer the humility of using paper towels.
You can complain at the price tag, but I think we would agree most hand dryers suck rather than blow. Would be nice to see a well made and cost optimized version. Say using off the shelf brushless motors and commodity turbine wheels.
Agreed – Dyson are undoubtedly overpriced but their hand dryers are way more effective than almost any of the competition and the price probably doesn’t matter that much if it means your restroom gets more people through faster because they’re not taking 5 minutes trying to dry their hands.
There is: paper towels. Also not worse for pandemics than germ blowers.
You mean all the ones that miss the trash can?
You should maybe go look up what pulp paper production looks like from the plantation to your butt wipe…
“But the company plants tons of trees” doesn’t look so good when you see how a forestation ravages the landscape. And that is BEFORE the trees even get cut…
Further, that hand-dryer myth has been debunked. Repeatedly.
The ONLY good scientific studies that have shown increases in aresolized bacteria/viruses or contamination in any way, have started with hands that were poorly washed or UNWASHED.
And in those studies the conclusion was OBVIOUS.
Drying method that sprays contaminated liquid away from hands, results in more contaminated liquid away from hands than method that wipes contaminated liquid away.
Nowhere in any legit study were there findings that air dryers blew more germs onto your hands than were wiped on your hands with paper towels. In fact, most studies show LESS contamination.
Further, the studies were concerned with people contaminating masks of others if they only ‘mimed’ hand washing in public. Which was extremely common, and has only gotten MORE common since COVID postures have relaxed.
So the concern with air dryers isn’t that YOUR use is infecting you. It is OTHER people not washing their hands and then using the hand dryer that potentially effects you.
Stop spreading this myth…
From the video: “…this HEPA filter which seems a little bit unnecessary for a hand dryer in a bathroom”
Well, without the filter a hand dryer is just a germ cannon. :/
How well do you think your average fuel station is going to maintain that filter?
The concept of jugaad says “no.”
They’re a gem cannon anyway, it gets blown off your manky paws into the air.
It’s a public bathroom. It’s already chock full of floating particles of other people’s poop.
HEPA filters need multiple passes through the filter to really reduce the bacterial load, so its still a germ cannon…
Yes, but does it blow the water back at you like the older ones that you stick your hands down into? Have they solved the problem of it being so loud that children scream and run away?
The only hot air hand dryer that I have ever encountered that worked well was one of the old school ones (1970s) in Arizona where the humidity was about 10%
Bathroom design is nuts. I think it’s kept in a perpetually bad state because it is taboo to change how people poo.
One of the best bathroom designs I every encountered was in an 1800s building. It was designed to be hands-free to reduce germ transmission. All without any electronics. Everything was peddle-operated (toilet flush, faucet, trash can lid, etc). And the door swung both ways so you could kick it open to go in and to go out.
Never understood the need for inward exterior doors in the toilets – even more so double inward doors!
Thought it ironic when a hospital worker emerged from a cubicle whilst I was in there relieving myself. He proceeded straight from the cubicle to pulling the inward door and left. Clean hands in a hospital are so last decade.
It’s so you can’t smack someone else with the door on your way out. The direction isn’t relevant in terms of hygiene because you’re expected to wash your hands, and opening in or out doesn’t make a difference if you skip that step.
It only works if everyone plays along. All it takes is one person not washing their hands, which is why you thoroughly dry your hands and use the paper towel to open the door.
I usually make like a gymnast/monkey and use my foot if it’s a particularly sketchy bathroom or doesn’t have paper towels.
@Miles: half of those non-washers in the world seem to work at my workplace. Given their lack of hygiene, I do not participate in the team potlucks. I can only imagine what their kitchens look like.
Take your immune system out for a jog TimT
Also: Don’t piss on your hands.
Also also: Don’t eat the big mint.
Also also also: Go outside and pee on tree, bathroom is from Trainspotting.
They go inward for safety. In crowds or a panic situation (i.e. fire), doors may be blocked or cause harm if they go outward. They aren’t blocked if you have to pull them inward.
Even in a non-panic situation, a bathroom door that suddenly swings outward might hit someone walking by.
during covid (when people were still washing their mail, not knowing it was an airborne disease), someone bolted a little metal platform with cleats to the bottom of the bathroom door at the Home Depot so you can pull it in with your foot. It’s still there and it’s great. I wish all public bathroom doors had that feature.
Handicap say thank you.
Hands-free everything sounds like a godly experience
Eh? Never had one blow back at me. And are kids easily spooked where you are?
I believe he’s talking about the ones that were sort of like a trough you put your hands down into then pulled out as the fans hot from both sides.
Those ones were gross because the water would pool in the trough and inevitably get blown around when trying to use it.
Yes, that’s the one.
And a drunk might mistake it for a urinal.
Looks both ways…walks away casually but quickly.
Japanese urinals, with anti-dribble heat and airflow, very snug.
RE: “a drunk might mistake it for a urinal” judging be the yellow spots they regularly were, until replaced with these (handlebars kinds).
Yeah these are nasty, I hate them. Give me a paper towel any day. More hygienic and 100% biodegradable.
In a small washroom with tiled walls, the sound level from an original Dyson Airblade can exceed occupational exposure sound limits (85 dBA), justifying hearing protection. They quote their “new improved” “50% quieter” one is 77 dBA, presumably measured in the usual anechoic chamber with sound-deadening wall treatment. “50% quieter” is just 3 dB, so it’s still likely over 80 dBA in an institutional washroom.
It’s not necessary to have a 100 km/h air blast to dry hands.
OSHA 1910.95(c)(1)
“. . . effective hearing conservation program, as described in paragraphs (c) through (o) of this section, whenever employee noise exposures equal or exceed an 8-hour time-weighted average sound level (TWA) of 85 decibels measured on the A scale (slow response) or, equivalently, a dose of fifty percent.”
Please don’t stay in there drying your hands for 8 hours.
I get paid the same for poopin as codin!
Truth:
Many solutions come to you after being distracted.
Why I keep a copy of ‘Finnigan’s Wake’ in the excremeditation chamber?
Double distraction.
To distract from biology I open to random page and attempt to decipher a random sentence.
By the time I’ve got a theory about the babble, my lizard brain has taken care of the poopin.
I pop the whole mess off my mental stack and the solution to my engineering problem is often there, as if by magic.
That’s what makes ‘Finnigan’s Wake’ a great book.
Why not use IR lamps (like the ones used in airfryer) for drying hands. It would not spread gems on your clothes.
It would either be so hot it could easily burn you, or so gentle it would take 5 minutes to actually dry your hands.
To persuade water to leave a surface at a significant rate without added airflow, you need to increase its vapor pressure to about the same or greater than the ambient atmospheric pressure. At sea level, this is 100 C. This is uncomfortably warm for most people.
(skipped a sentence:)
To raise its vapour pressure, you need to raise its temperature.
…and we wonder why we have an energy and material resources crisis.
Yet another example of brilliant engineering wasted on something pointless.
If it only runs for a few seconds each minute or less then it’s not a big deal if it’s 900W.
I would be interested to see a study on the energy usage of one of these compared to the fuel used for making paper towels repeatedly and the trash that produces.
Greenest option is probably just destigmatizing wiping your hands on your pants. But then again pants aren’t perfectly clean…
Reminds me of the hand dryer at university several years ago with a large metal push button on the front. The label on the front said
1. Push button to operate.
2. Rotate hands in airflow.
3. Stops automatically.
Someone pencilled in
4. Wipe hands on pants.
What is an “IGBT-based gate driver”?
And yeah, I hate having to “suffer the humility” of just about anything…
https://components101.com/articles/what-is-igbt-working-operation-symbol-and-types
Next year Dyson will put out a square wheel and tell us how angles are more sturdy and elegant or some crap. Dunno, I have never been impressed with James Dyson himself nor most of their products which are usually operating on 80% hype and exist elsewhere in the world. It took decades and millions of dollars to build a friggin vacuum instead of a jet. More for others I guess.
Square wheels believe it or not kick ass. I have a set on my longboard and they go over any crappy surface that would stop any other board and send you flying in your direction of travel. Deadly little rocks are harmless with these bad boys too. And everybody asks are those square wheels? Or what happened to your wheels? Search Shark Wheels. Not a dyson invention.
In the US I see many more ads for “refurbished” Dyson products than for new ones. Normally, refurbished units are factory returns due to defects. Maybe the Algorithm knows I am not someone who would pay $500 for a fan, steering me toward those, but I see a couple other possibilities. The first being that Dyson has a huge quality control problem and there really are more refurbs for sale than new products. Or maybe Dyson dumps their world-wide supply of refurbs in the US where people are typically cheapskates or just too poor to afford the new products at new prices. Another possibility is that Dyson uses a two tier marketing scheme where new products are sold with full warranty, at the typically ridiculous Dyson prices, to people who are price insensitive, and “refurbs”, that are actually new products, are sold at a discount with a much shorter warranty to the unwashed horde.
When I was looking for a vacuum cleaner a few years back, reviews of Dyson units almost all complained about the noise level. I bought a Miele vacuum (the Algorithm doesn’t quite have me figured out yet!). I have never seen a refurb Miele product for sale anywhere. Hmmm.
A quality problem is certainly possible.
However, sometimes in retail sales, a return for any reason causes a high-value unit to go through a refurbish cycle. This can mean everything from repairing an actual fault to adding in the instruction manual that was missing from an otherwise functional returned unit.
So, a significant number of refurbs are there because it was too noisy, or the color didn’t match the wall paint, or it didn’t fit in the closet. Even “My spouse yelled at me for spending a car payment on a fancy vacuum cleaner.”
When I lived in the UK, everyone raved about the Dyson vacuum cleaners, but in my experience they really didn’t perform that well. Most people I knew bought them refurbished, with the logics that if they can be repaired, they must be good. I have a Miele Vacuum cleaner, it is really quiet and has way better suction than the Dyson. The price point is similar.
I live in Germany. We have a Miele vacuum cleaner. It is around 20 years old. Quiet, powerful, always works. Change the filter and bag once in a while, all good.
My father in law kept buying cheap crap for my mother in law to use. She landed in the hospital last month, so my wife did some cleanup in her mother’s house. She threw away all three of the cheap-ass vacuums that her mother had, and we went and bought a new Miele. My wife says the other machines couldn’t suck a slice of baloney off a piece of bread (rough translation of a German phrase.) At any rate, the cheap vacuums such because they don’t suck worth a damn.
That should be “the cheap vacuums suck.”
Same experience, dyson stick vacuums are kinda useless, nice for the stairs tho
So uh, why is there a fuse somewhere below 20 screws and in shrink tubing soldered to a wire? Aren’t they supposed to be quickly replaceable?
A fuse blows to stop the wiring from catching fire. It blows because something else failed. No consumer is going to debug and repair a device like this before replacing the fuse. Ergo, the manufacturer makes the fuse not replaceable by the consumer. It saves lawyer bills and makes the industrial design cleaner.
Further, it forces building owners/maintenance to RMA/replace a unit with a blown fuse instead of potentially shoving a bolt in the fuse holder and starting a fire, or even worse, someone with a security torx bit and just enough knowledge to be dangerous being “helpful” and “fixing” that hand dryer that’s always broken.
Also, where a traditional hand dryer might have a fan that starts drawing more current because the intake is blocked with dust, or a heating element that’s slightly out of spec, this dryer’s motor current is digitally monitored and controlled, and, contrary to the article, I think think there’s no heating element. So in theory, any unit with a blown fuse definitely has a fault, and should be properly repaired/replaced, rather than just having its fuse swapped.
Also also, expensive dryers like these are going in places like airports and fancy new buildings, offices and shopping centres. Places with a high appetite for CapEx, but who want to minimise unpredictable ongoing costs. If one of these breaks, they have to pay 10 minutes of staff time to take it off the wall and 10 minutes to re-fit the new one. They don’t want to pay half an hour of staff time to actually do the repair, they don’t want an asset sitting around waiting to be repaired, and they don’t want to have to keep a spare asset that spends most of its time not making money. Ideally, they would even just have a contract where Dyson sends one of their own engineers out to do the swap and they don’t have to pay anything other than the annual contract fee. And Dyson, much like Apple, would probably rather swap the entire internals rather than diagnose and fix each individual fault.
A waste of the earth’s resources? Sure. But not a waste of company resources.
But wow, when overengineering for filtering the noise of cheaper parts saves costs.
I have a beard. Sometimes I want to wash my face. My face does not fit under those Dyson blowers. Hence I am forced to use toilet paper to dry my beard. That falls apart. Apart from that, toilet paper normally hangs close to the toilet and might come into contact with germs.
/me not happy with Dyson. at. all.
Should have made one with a directional nozzle. Dry a face, or some pits.
Think it was Confucious who once said ,life is simple , why do we over complicate it?
I’ve come across countless products that don’t need to be so complicated in fact it can be an hindrance to the job they are supposed to do.