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Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

Automatic faucets are one of my favorite examples of positive added technology. They're flaky and annoying to activate, but compared to the possibility of leaving a faucet running full-blast for (potentially) hours? That's a huge improvement.

Automatic soap dispensers are much less persuasive to me, though. There was no "just open" state to get rid of, so the flakiness is offering much less benefit. You have to touch pump-dispensers, sure, but that's also done before you wash your hands.

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Automatic soap dispensers aren't addressing the "dispenser left running" problem (which, as you note, doesn't exist), they are addressing the "user interaction with pump mechanism breaks pump mechanism requiring replacement of mechanism or whole dispenser" problem.

Ah, point. I had totally missed that upside.

I do share the article's vague irritation at trading user convenience (the dispenser works) for owner convenience (the dispenser doesn't break), but it's hardly a huge deal.

A dispenser that has broken also doesn't work. I think the trade-off with (poor, I've seen good ones where this isn't the case) automatic dispensers is reduced median performance in exchange for reduced frequency of total unusability.

What's wrong with the faucets that instead of turning, you push down and they run for a few seconds before stopping?

My pet hate of public toilets now are the airblade style hand dryers. My hands are seemingly too big, so to dry the top (closest to my wrist) I need to bend my fingers to avoid touching the puddle of water and dirt in the bottom.

>What's wrong with the faucets that instead of turning, you push down and they run for a few seconds before stopping?

dirty hands touch them a lot and you have to touch them multiple times during handwashing, re-dirtying your hands

if the stream actually lasted a reasonable amount of time it would be less of an issue but i dont think i've seen that ever

Without towels you're going to touch the door handle on the way out anyways. People that don't wash their hands touched the door handle. My point is to stop pretending you can keep your hands clean for any significant duration

I generally use my feet to open doors actually. It's not at all hard and with touchless faucets and toilets I pretty much only touch paper towels.

With doors you can push to exit, sure. More troublesome are those you have to pull. I basically have to wait impatiently by the door for the next guy to come in so I can get out without touching the door with my hand.

Use a paper towel or the sleeve of your jacket or shirt.

While the airblade dryers aren't a big deal to me, the ones I really hate are the ear-splitting Xcelerators and such. Couldn't they at least mount those on a sound-absorbent board so that my ears don't ring after using it?

Those things are evil. Your comment just made me actually check, and it is as bad as I thought: they're right on the edge of causing hearing damage.

Company-promised volume claims ~78dB with spikes to 90, but a couple of studies suggest all hand-dryer companies are lying (or rather, using favorable bathroom layouts). It looks like the Xcelerator has hit 97dB in studies, and I could swear bad layouts are worse than that - they sound about rock-concert loud.

Which isn't a huge threat to users, it's just aggravating, but is actually enough to break labor laws if you have a bathroom attendant working in there.

Not to mention the fact that Airblades basically spew all the bacteria and viruses that were on your hands all over the bathroom.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/13/dyson-airblades-s...

Airblades are truly awful.

> Not to mention the fact that Airblades basically spew all the bacteria and viruses that were on your hands all over the bathroom.

Traditionally, one washes one's hands before using a drier rather than (as the test in the story did) dipping them in a bath of viruses.

This is a good point, actually.

I do wish the stream was a bit longer - thorough non-surgical handwashing might take 30 seconds, longer with very dirty hands, and the usual push faucet is perhaps 10 seconds. But the idea is great; my core desire isn't for motion-sensing sinks but automatic-shutoff ones.

I share the airblade problem. The basic model is brilliant, they work far better than traditional hand dryers, but the hand space is perhaps 30% smaller than it needs to be for large hands.

The stream lasts for some amount of time between 3.5 and 8 seconds. Each sink has a different pressure, most too high, a few too low, one just right. When one hundred people go to use the bathroom in a five minute period, that one functioning (other than turning itself off) sink is certainly not available, so the only means of pressure control is to use multiple faucets simultaneously as pressure reliefs, turning hand washing into a soapy game of whack a mole in which your pants come out sprayed from the knees up. Hope you weren't wearing khakis.

I confess I don't care about the toilets flushing multiple times. With how little water toilets use per flush now, it always takes multiple passes to do the job properly, anyway.

At 5'1 I'm often too short to easily use them, I have to stand on my tip toes and try to balance and not hit the walls of those air blade monsters that like to fling water in my face. I guess children have to just walk around with wet hands. I hate those things.

Wait, where are people mounting them?

Being tall, I usually have to hunch over to activate airblades placed somewhere south of my waist, which would be viable for anyone over about 4'. Apparently there's not much consensus on how to place those things.

In my neck of the woods, they're usually on the walls. There doesn't appear to be any standard for how high to place them, it's just wherever it happens to fit. Probably fine for most adults, but shorties and children...nope.

I've seen one recently that was attached to the sink, which was better for being able to reach it, but the place where the water dripped was maybe 6 inches below the air output, so water went -everywhere-.

I enjoyed sinks activated by pushing down on a pedal with your foot. Maybe there are problems for handicapped people but I find this to be a nice solution to those that complain the water stream always stops before you're done.

It's not just me then! I hate these things with a passion too. I have largish hands, but hardly out of the ordinary, and yet I find it difficult to put my hands in and out of the drier without touching the bottom or sides. Another problem I find with these is that they tend to spray the water coming off your hands all over your face.

Not my favourite tech!

Why not have faucets that you can turn on and off at will, but after N seconds of no "user input" they turn off automatically? Don't even make a super complicated faucet, just add an automatically operated valve to the pipe, and make it open quickly, but not instantly (so when you touch the faucet that was running at full blast you don't have an instant mess). Anything that involves a timer or a fixed water speed drives me nuts, and it's not because I like to waste water, at all. It's because I know how to use the thing, and might even want to use less than the fixed dose I'm offered.

The article makes the case of these technologies being positive for parties other than the end user, even when the result for the end user is a net negative. (I.E., automatic faucets save water by preventing it from running full-blast for hours, which saves money for the building owners, but it does so by annoying end users.)

In almost all cases, it's possible to optimize to make both parties happy; when this doesn't happen, it demonstrates a power asymmetry: the people who use these mechanisms (usually installed by an institution: public bathrooms, office coffee machines) matter less than the owners.

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