[chris (OP)]

What is your opinion of the hot-air dryer in the public conveniences? Noisy, loathsome germ-spredding waste of energy, or highly useful?

[alancalverd]

Keeps the place warm, a lot less messy than paper towels, a lot less maintenance and frustration than roller towels. Keeps the punters happy.

Waste of energy? Probably not as the alternatives use a lot of energy in papermaking or laundry.

Germspreading? I don't think many respiratory infections are carried in urine or faeces, and most of them presumably get washed off in the sink - why else would anyone need a dryer?

Useful? No. If the water was hot enough to have any cleaning effect, the residue will dry off in a few seconds.

[dlorde]

I prefer paper towels, but people can't seem to help making a mess with them. For me, hot air dryers are second best because they tend to be slow, noisy, and poorly designed (e.g. shutting off too soon, or unless your hands are placed just so). I've heard that traditional hot air dryers spread just as many 'germs' as roller towels (which never seem to be adjusted right), but haven't seen the evidence. The Dyson Airblade dryers are a reasonable effort, but they're too noisy, and slightly annoying, for some reason...

[David Cooper]

A cold air dryer works nearly as quickly and uses a lot less power. Washing your hands with hot water isn't greatly important either - what matters is using soap (and there's no benefit in that being antibacterial). You want to detatch anything oily from your hands, because that's where most of the bacteria are held, and it's soap that helps do that while the water is used to wash the detached oil away. Any bacteria blown about by air dryers will be a trivial issue. There are two much greater problems which need to be addressed before anything else though: if you have to touch a tap to turn it off, you need to wash your hands again afterwards, so you can get stuck in an infinite loop (or you have to contaminate your elbow. [Many taps don't work that way - they switch off all by themselves without giving you sufficient time to wash your hands under them, so you end up having to wash the tap thoroughly as well as your hands and use much more water than you would with a normal tap.] Also, if you have to touch a handle to open the door to make your escape, you'll need to go straight back to wash your hands again because of all the filthy people who don't bother to wash their hands properly (or at all), and the same problem applies to any other door handle you have to touch beyond there.

I don't think these problems will be easy to solve because most people are too filthy and don't care, and they may even be healthier as a result. When I was in primary school, people stared at me in astonishment when I spent a couple of minutes cleaning the drinking fountain nozzle before drinking from the jet of water - they were all happy to suck the nozzle without any cleaning being done at all. They might as well have given each other a French kiss, but they couldn't see the connection. For most people, germs simply aren't part of their world.

[dlorde]

The current arrangements in toilets - both public and private - seem set up to permit a degree of contamination, at least of clothing; I assume this is just a matter of convenience, but I find myself wondering whether there's an optimal degree of challenge necessary to keep the immune system 'up to date' with the current threats in the locale, and whether the risk of occasional sickness comes with the territory, so to speak. How much more sterility (less day to day cross-contamination) would lead to a greater risk of serious sickness in the long term, due to immune isolation (similar to the risks of going on holiday to an entirely new microbial environment and getting sick from the local bugs)?

Just pondering...

[Lynda]

I like to take a spare face cloth with me to use as a towel.   I then put it in the washing machine on my return home - to be included in the next wash.  I don't like being caught without a towel - or leaving a "Ladies" with damp hands!

[mandy789]

Actually, I will use the hand-dryer as long as the toilets have it.
Before this post, I never think about the energy-waste, noisy problems, I just don't want my hand to be cold.
But afterwards, Maybe I will think more about the environment problem.

[David Cooper]

It's nice to have the warmth (both in the tap water and blower) in winter, but the rest of the year it seriously isn't needed.