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In the Land of Manual Hand Dryers
Aug 6, 2008 | Lucas
As some of my readers may know, I have spent the last month and a half in Europe, visiting Poland, France, Spain and the Czech Republic. Obviously, during that time period I had to go to the washroom on numerous occasions, and at times, out of the comfort of the home.
Most public washrooms provide a way for you to dry your hands after you wash them. There are several approaches that are taken, but today I will talk about convection-based hand-drying devices. More specifically, there are two types of these machines: automatic hand dryers, and manual hand dryers. I will be discussing the latter.
The problem with manual hand dryers is the lack of control over the amount of time the dryer dries your hands. You can increase it only in fixed intervals of roughly 20 to 30 seconds. Unfortunately, almost everywhere in the world where I have used manual hand dryers (Canada, USA, Poland, France, Italy, Czech Republic, etc...) I had to press the button twice, but only using half the second drying period. With hand-dryer power supplies reaching over 2300W, and being used by so many people each day, this creates a horrible waste of energy that only contributes to the increasing entropy of our universe.
The only exception was Spain, however. I was in several public washrooms in Spain, and each time I was able to completely dry my hands with one press of the button. I think Spain deserves some special recognition for this wonderful feat of energy efficiency and hand-drying excellence.