TECH guru and billionaire Sir James Dyson was on a crusade last night to convince Australians to shell out $1590 for a high-tech bathroom tap that also dries your hands.
Its cost is a big step up from, say, the meagre $4 price of a metro-ribbed hand towel featured in K-Mart’s online catalogue yesterday that claims to do the same job.
But the British industrial designer who gave us dual cyclone vacuum cleaners, air blade dryers in public loos and bladeless fans is unrelenting in singing the new Airblade tap hand dryer’s capabilities.
Put your hands under the tap, and Dyson’s marvel squirts water on them for cleaning; move your hands slightly outwards, and it blows them dry in seconds without leaving the sink. Infrared filters monitor hand positions.
Sir James, who was in Sydney yesterday to launch the tap dryer and two other drying devices, said the tap dryer also stopped you having “to cross paths with anyone” in a public bathroom and avoided passing on germs that “multiply at an alarming rate”.
Hot air blow dryers took 45 seconds or so to evaporate water and stripped skin of natural oils, he said.
In contrast, Dyson’s motor created two high velocity sheets of unfiltered heated air on the tap’s branches that literally scraped hands dry.
Washroom air was passed through a “HEPA filter” that removed 99.9 per cent of bacteria while six “Helmholtz silencers” reduced motor noise, he said.
Despite the steep price tag, there was a view last night that the tap dryer would be outrageously successful. Prestigious hotels would buy them, as would new housing apartment blocks and homes seeking upmarket appeal.
One reason for buying a tap dryer is, according to Dyson – economy. It can dry 15 pairs of hands for the price of a single paper towel and costs $48 a year to run.
Sir James also launched an upgraded model of the common Airblade hand dryer. The new model is lighter and quieter, with its high pitched wine replaced by a quieter, lower frequency sound.
The Airblade V is another public oriented dryer. It’s less conspicuous than the mk2hand with angular looks.
Being a mob of engineers and industrial designers makes Dyson a company keen on statistics.
Its newest hand dryers were the result of nearly three years’ R&D by 125 Dyson engineers and an investment of $60m and more than 3300 prototypes were built during testing. These tests simulated washing hands more than one billion times.
Sir James said hand dryers were repeated belted by a mechanical devices to simulate attacks by football hooligans.
So there’s more to drying hands with Dyson than a load of hot air.
The tap dryer is due to go on sale in July for $1590, the V hand dryer will cost $1,290, while the mk2 hand dryer starts from $1390.
Dyson is on a roll with profits last year up more than 30 per cent, to more than $465 million. The company employs more than 4000 people worldwide and in Britain, a Dyson vacuum cleaner is sold every 30 seconds.
