Hands down!
The UK-based Dyson, is known in India for premium brands of air purifiers, hairdryers and vacuum cleaners. This year, the company is going back basics: how we clean our hands. Yes, there are sanitizers that claim to kill bacteria from our palms, but when we wash our hands with water we are compelled, in public places, to dry them with paper tissues. You need human intervention to dispose of the used tissues by the sack full. Alternatively, we have those noisy hand dryers at multiplexes and hotel lobbies that direct a blast of warm air at your hands.
A jet of hot air falling on your palms to dry out the water can cause the skin to damage and continue to be a breeding ground for bacteria. Also, hygiene levels at public washrooms are not the best, and traditional hand dryers, suck in the same foul air, heat it up and push it on to your hands. So, Dyson, turned to the HEPA or High-Efficiency Particulate Air filter found in all room air purifiers -- a fine mesh that removes 99.97 per cent of all microbe-sized particles -- and put it to work in its latest product, the Dyson Airblade 9KJ, hand dryer.
It harnesses its patented V4 digital motor to operate in two air thrust modes, and by clever design of the airflow plus some foam silencers, has sharply reduced noise. It claims to draw in 23 litres of air per second to release sheets of air at 624 km/hr, for 10 seconds, with the HEPA filter kicking in, real time. A motion sensor detects your hand within 0.2 seconds and stops the motor the moment you withdraw your hands. Does all this seem like techno overkill? We won't complain, if it's the germs on our hands that get killed!
Like all Dyson products, you get an aesthetic product with minimalist design. The Airblade 9KJ just introduced in India seems to be aimed at public washrooms and costs the equivalent of USD 1300. Considering that you can save on reams of single use paper, the makers say this will actually end up saving a lot of money. Such technologies have a habit of trickling down to the consumer end, so don't be surprised if some premium apartment buyers demand one for their bathrooms this year.
