Dyson’s Airblade hand dryer comes home

Across Australia, hundreds of public bathrooms have done away with hand towel dispensers and installed the Airblade, an insanely fast hand dryer. Now the team at Dyson have something else with the same technology, and it’s so nifty, you just might want it in your home.

The latest release of Dyson’s Airblade offers three versions of the speedy air pushing product, and one is small enough to be integrated in your bathroom.

From left to right: Dyson's second-generation Airblade next to the Airblade V.

Most of these are designed for a commercial bathroom, including the big one people have probably seen before – now in a second-generation model and made even better by the latest generation of Dyson digital motor which now spins at 90,000 times a minute and draws as much as 30 litres of air per second – and a smaller Airblade V which protrudes just ten centimetres from the wall.

And then there’s one which, while engineered for commercial use, could work at home.

The Dyson Airblade Tap hand dryer is a combination tap and Airblade hand dryer – exactly what the name suggests – which uses the same Dyson digital motor as its larger brothers.

The tap is simple to use and uses infrared sensors to check where your hands are, so you don’t have to touch anything. Once you’ve washed your hands from the main tap – the middle column – you can move them under the branches off to the side and the tap will start drying your hands, sending out bursts of air for 12 seconds that rids the hands of all that moisture.

Representatives for Dyson told GadgetGuy that while the Airblade Tap is by no means quiet, it also isn’t as loud as the larger units found in either the Mark 2 or V models.

We’re not sure how many home-owners will be keen to grab one, though, with pricing coming in at $1,590, probably higher than that of a regular plumbing fitting.

Still, if you find hand towels a pain to have around, this could be worth checking out.

Dyson's Airblade Tap hand dryer, with the Dyson digital motor underneath.