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.
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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/
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At my work there was a trash can just under the water fountain between the two doors of the bathroom. perfect design.
The only dryers I like are the Dyson ones the air blade ones.
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…
You’re a supposed to move your hands out slowly and the air blade wipes the water away.
I am well aware. No one else is.
They are efficient, but way too loud.
Every air dryer that doesn’t suck is extremely loud
The heated ones are decent if someone preheated it for you.
I have never had the luxury of using a heated air dryer
I haven’t ever seen a door like that, except in hospitals. I wish they’d become more popular in my area
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Not everyone is able to not skip leg day.
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.
Open the door with your foot, hold it with your elbow.
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
Or when the soap dispenser is touchless but not the tap.
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.
The best design is no door. You walk in and around a corner / wall… Think airport.
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.
I mean hell yes I’m for this. Just the obvious solution of “make it push” might not work.
How about a door that swings both way
Potentially an issue of smacking people in a busy hallway.
A handle you can hook your arm around would solve this.
In some restaurants I’ve seen double swing doors on the toilet entrance.
Touchless booth door but then its occupancy detector is faulty ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡ °)
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
I’m seeing them More and more. They aren’t expensive either.
Easy. Just lick the door handle 3 ~ 4 times to clean it so that you don’t need to get your hands dirty.
That’s how I do it and I’ve only had Covid 5 times! Works like a charm.
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It depends, if he has had it once per year he’s caught up to Covid-2024
Gotta collect them all
Yup! You also sometimes get free nutrients on the door handle ☺️
I see you also have a toddler.
I just grab the handle using my butt cheeks.
Omega Brain over here, making us feel dumb.
The sensors aren’t there for your convenience to turn them on, they are there to save the business money by turning them off.
Yeah, businesses hate it when you leave the soap on.
Portion control.
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.
Don’t those blowers spread way more germs than just using a paper towel?
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.
Those dyson.airblade urinals are typically so messy that they defeat the purpose of touch less.
Please stop peeing on those. They are not actually urinals.
Listen, superchief. If I piss in it it’s a urinal.
There’s piss in you, so aren’t you really the urinal?
Nobody put it there, though. It’s incident to being a meatbag. So I guess people can be urinals but aren’t necessarily urinals.
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:
The Step n’ Pull should be standard.
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.
I went to college the S curves, as well as one office briefly before the pandemic, but they were both off the “main drag” by a bit. Like along a hallway that didn’t have people just sitting nearby.
As is eternally the case, location matters
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
They all just blow hot germs around though.
Also they are way too fucking loud. Just use paper, people.
Paper runs out and can cause a mess in a busy public restroom.
the dyson airblade v is good
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.
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.
I don’t like the sleeve method. Grime just hangs out on your sleeves and then gets deep in the fibers. No thank you. I use my pinky and ring fingers when I absolutely have to.
Pinky and ring finger for me too!
The step n pull was actually a shark tank product
Easy, just open it with your teeth, then your hands will stay clean.
There are add on “foot handles” that sort this out, but they are pretty uncommon.
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.
