PABCAS, the blog of Paul Martin Campbell

I really hate hand drying machines in toilets. At least I hate the ones that send a piddly bit of warm air at about 2mph and you’d dry your hands quicker by blowing on them.

That’s why I got really excited a couple years ago when I used the XLerator at a Greyhound layover station on a trip in the USa. The XLerator is shaped like a rocket pack and delivers a (very) fast stream of air downwards with a roaring noise, drying hands in seconds and getting the heart racing to boot.

Today, though, I experienced the Dyson Airblade in MacDonalds on Grafton Street, of all places. I wasn’t quite sure what it was – in fact it was odd seeing the Dyson name in a toilet. But, encouraged by my previous XLerator experience, I placed my hands into this rather odd looking contraption.

The device works by shooting a thin stream of air ( apparently .3 mm ) at 400mph. It claimed my hands would be dry in 10 seconds, but it took far less than that. The other bonus was that because you put your hands in rather than under, there’s no pool of water underneath. Reading about it on EnGadget , I found the thing actually iodises the water and sends it back in to the air as disinfected vapour. Sweeet.

Engadget also reported that it’s not altogether an original idea – that comments from the original article showed that competing devices from Mitsubishi have been around in the East in Japan and Taiwan for years.

Still, with products like these out there, there’s really no excuse for hand towels and crappy pansy driers not worth their weight in hot air.