One of the positives from the covid pandemic is a lot of bathroom doors can be opened with your foot now.
Also the return of paper towels for hand drying.
I hate those stupid air dryers. Most of them barely do any better than just shaking your hands in the air, because they’re simply spraying your clean hands with all of the shit and piss particles that are floating in the air.
Would rather have some cheap paper towels so I can dry my hands, and use the towel to open the door before throwing it in the trash.
Additionally, my understanding is that a lot of the cleaning done by washing your hands is mechanical, and using a paper towel with a slightly rough and absorbent surface scrapes off all the stuff that has been loosened by washing with soap and water.
Outside of antibacterial or germicidal soaps, the cleaning action of washing with soap is 100% mechanical. Soap molecules are asymmetrical and have one side that’s hydrophilic and one side that’s hydrophobic which, when used with water, creates a nifty mechanism that picks up crap on one side and catches a ride on the water molecules with the other side.
Isn't basic soap also destroying the lipidic membrane of most bacteria? It doesn't need to be specific antibacterial soap for that.
Regular soap does also kill bacteria with those hydrophobic sides of its molecules by breaking a bacteria or virus’ lipid membrane. I would argue this still a mechanical process though. Antibacterial soaps use a specific chemical, Triclosan, that binds with enzymes within the bacteria that prevent it from reproducing.
Most of them barely do any better than just shaking your hands in the air,
I saw one of these once where someone scratched "4. wipe hands on pants" on the instruction panel.
The trick is to shake dry in the sink, then rub the moisture up past your wrists onto your forearms, creating a thin layer. Then use the dryer, repeating the rubbing motion spreading the moisture out until it's gone.
because they’re simply spraying your clean hands with all of the shit and piss particles that are floating in the air.
This is the real problem. Apparently, the Dyson air blades are the worst: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/dyson-dryers-hurl-60x-more-viruses-most-at-kid-face-height-than-other-dryers/
They’re pretty bad. Putting your hands down in a hole and spraying water all over isn’t real sanitary. I’ve seen some that are really dirty inside!
The new generation doesn’t use this bad design anymore. The Dyson Airblade V is just a box with two sharp edges that blows the water right onto your pants and the Airblade Wash+Dry works in a similiar way with a little bit sleeker design. Both of them have hepa filters too, so from a hygienic standpoint they are much better than their old airblades and the clones that filled the market.
They're nice, but I've never seen anyone use them properly. Then again I rarely see people wash their hands properly either...
At my work there was a trash can just under the water fountain between the two doors of the bathroom. perfect design.
I haven't ever seen a door like that, except in hospitals. I wish they'd become more popular in my area
Those foot pull hooks are useful, but I have yet to figure out how to get out the door without an awkward shuffle step or downright stumble as I pull the door open.
Seriously though, one of my biggest pet peeves is when they get every other aspect of touch-less design correct, and then fail with the door.
#designfails
That’s solved with getting extra soap, scrubbing the tap, rinsing the tap with water when you rinse your hands.
The door thing is still the biggest
As long as there's paper towels you can lather, wash, dry with a clean paper towel, and then use that to turn off the faucet/open the door without touching them. It sounds germophobic, but it really is the best way for us to use public restrooms and protect each others' health.
My understanding (which may be false) is that this can come about from competing design considerations and regulations. Like... It's ideal to be able to push the door open from the inside of the bathroom so you don't have to touch a nasty doorhandle, but you also don't want somebody to be able to put something in front of the door, potentially trapping you in the bathroom (particularly in the event of a fire... Dying in a fire is probably worse than touching a nasty doorhandle), and you also don't want doors to unexpectedly swing open into busy hallways. This drives me nuts too, though.
Eh, there's an easy solution that a lot of places are starting to use. A foot pull. Probably costs $5-10. No real excuse for any place not installing these.
Don't think you need it that much. You're going to wash your hands after. There's a small chance you could contract something before using the bathroom from it, unsure on the likelihood of that transmission.
Given that it has a blow dryer instead of paper towels I doubt the door handle is an issue
Why don't more doors have foot pedals? I saw them in a mcdonalds and now I'm wondering why t f they aren't everywhere
Easy. Just lick the door handle 3 ~ 4 times to clean it so that you don't need to get your hands dirty.
And you can open the door with a paper towel too. Also, paper is one of our most renewable resources, and most recyclable.
and still et's energy intense to recycle and a lot of paper (over 60%) is new paper from old woods in th easc of Europe.
I'm in the States so I'm not familiar with situation over there. Here we use super thick plots of trees that grow in about 10 years. We also pulp wood from managed forests where we can't afford to let it burn, like around major towns. We definitely used to clear cut, but it's not legal anymore.
The sensors aren't there for your convenience to turn them on, they are there to save the business money by turning them off.
It can be both.
Mechanical/timer versions with auto-shut-off of all of these exist, but you have to touch those.
I don’t like those mechanical/timer ones. Especially the ones with a push button top, always felt like I had to smack the button several times just to get twenty seconds of water.
Those dyson.airblade urinals are typically so messy that they defeat the purpose of touch less.
Nobody put it there, though. It's incident to being a meatbag. So I guess people can be urinals but aren't necessarily urinals.
My favourite is the kind of S curve that some places have, so you just walk in, but it's private enough that people can't just leer from the hallway or whatever I'm not actually sure what we're accomplishing with doors here unless it's a very tight space I guess like if the bathroom is near the area where patrons eat at a resto? Yeah I get that, door away. Sorry for rambling.
I worked in an office that had the S curve bathroom and I do not recommend it. People who sat on that side of the floor got to hear the air dryer every time someone used the bathroom. Also, the smells... Automatic door openers are the answer.
Sometimes a trash bin is located near the door, so I'll use the same paper towel I used to dry my hands to open the door, hold the door open with my foot, then throw the paper towel in the bin. But these make hygiene so much easier:
Need those foot handles to kick the door open. God bless establishments that have installed them.
Otherwise, I roll my sleave over my hand and pull the door open. Especially in restaurants.
A hobby of mine is to get annoyed at hand dryers. 80% of the models I find are eyerollingly useless. Blow a faint breeze for five seconds, stop and refuse to trigger again no matter how much you try to slap the air in front of it.
Then there are those 5% that actually gets it. Blowing a jet stream that makes the water droplets sublimate so fast you forget you even washed.
Small thing, sublimation occurs when a solid converts immediately to a gas with no liquid state between. This happens with dry ice commonly
Yup, although it can also have a tendency to stop after a few seconds and refuse to elaborate.
I keep thinking it'd be a good idea to patent a hand dryer that points the detector in one direction and the blower in another, such that to switch it on you have to move your hands out of the air stream, and to switch it off you have to move your hands into it. Your hands get dry not by the blower, but by the action of moving your hands to and fro between the detector and the blower.
Nobody would object or claim prior art because that would put them on record as directly admitting their products are shit.
Then sue everyone whose hand dryers do exactly that. I'd make a killing.
Yeah, I just ran ino this for the first time a few days ago by coincidence. I guess it works and makes sense. A little awkward and won't work for everyone, but maybe the best solution
When they have paper towels, what I do is take the last one with which I dried my hands to grab or pinch the door handle and pull.
The shopping mall where I live has the metal stripe at the bottom that's clearly there to protect the door when you open it with your shoe... But they open inwards to the bathroom.
Hand driers that use air increase "germs" on your skin. Paper towels reduce them.
If there are no paper towels I use toilet paper. Last time I used a public restroom I dried my hands on my pants.
There is a lot of fear-mongering and misinformation about paper towels vs air dryers. Paper towels are marginally more hygienic because air dryers spray the particles off your hand into the air. Neither are a good option if you don’t wash your hands well to begin with.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/25/hand-dryers-paper-towels-hygiene-dyson-airblade
I dont know if this has been definitively proven as last I heard the studies that reflected this were paid for by paper manufacturers.
They are unsanitary and don't actually dry your hands, but they save the company money, so they're what we get.
Apparently saliva does contain some antimicrobial enzymes who knew.
I grab it with the edge of my shirt. While it's not ideal, my shirt will be washed later and it spares me having to deal with risk of fecal particles on my hands where they can immediately reach my face.
It's strange that automatic doors are standard on the outside of just about every shop, but nobody has ever thought to put them indoors.
Because it's an extra expense, not just to install but to maintain. They put them on the exterior door because it lets people in faster and easier (more customers) and is easier to haul out your purchases when you leave so you are encouraged to buy things without thinking as much about logistics. Bathroom doors being automated vs manual is almost never going to affect sales.
Yeah, this drives me crazy. Best thing I can do if I have a jacket or long sleeved shirt on, is to put my hand inside the sleeve and open it that way