It’s Time to Go Touchless: The No-Touch Hand Drying Solution

Consider all the items a single person touches in one day. On average, research conducted in 2015 showed that the average person touches 140 distinct objects every day. Each of these objects comes with their own set of bacteria — some innocuous and some that can cause viruses and illness.

Limiting touches has become more than an option or piece of consideration for architects, designers, and facility managers. It’s now a requirement, one that could become a deciding factor in how customer choose which businesses they visit. When considering a restroom, it’s widely discussed how much bacteria is located on various surfaces — toilet handles, sink handles, soap dispensers, door handles, and light switches are just some of the places that are known to be covered in bacteria.

Thankfully, in most restrooms, many of these items are already touchless; touchless soap dispensers, automatic-flush toilets, and motion-censor lights are mainstays in most bathrooms. When looking at hand drying methods, touchless is critical in two key ways: requiring no touches from customers, but also needing the fewest touches possible by maintenance staff.

End-users have several options when it comes to touchless hand drying options. There, of course, are motion-sensor paper towel dispensers available, as well as touchless hand dryers like the XLERATOR®. Both options offer fewer touches than traditional models, but hand dryers typically allow for even greater distance from the unit than paper towel dispensers. In addition, paper towel dispensers can get jammed, which requires users to manipulate a knob to restart the unit. Hand dryers eliminate all touches required by a user, ensuring they can maintain their clean, freshly washed hands.

An infrequently considered component is that of maintenance. With a paper towel dispenser, almost constant touches are required of staff — filling the dispensers daily (or more often for commercial facilities), as well as cleaning up both properly discarded towels in garbage bins and improperly discarded towels left on floors or in sinks and toilets. In this way, paper towels create much hassle and strain on custodial staff, while also requiring them to touch many surfaces on a daily basis.

A hand dryer, however, eliminates the headache and nearly all of the touches required. In general, with a touchless bathroom hand dryer like the XLERATOR, touches are very limited and even rare, required only for maintenance like cleaning the prefilter or making adjustments to speed, sound or heat controls.
Considering these factors, and the critical need to limit interactions with objects, especially in highly trafficked areas such as restrooms, touchless hand dryers are a clear necessity. Learn how a hand dryer can save you time, money and touches.