Can hand dryers – with their loud noises, damage someone’s hearing? Nora Keegan, an eight grader from Calgary did a study to find the answer to that question. CNN has the details:
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“Informally, parents have said that their children refuse to go into particular washrooms because the dryers are too noisy, and children say they ‘hurt my ears,’ ” Nora wrote.
Using a decibel meter, Nora measured the peak loudness of 44 public-bathroom hand dryers from several positions. She positioned the meter to simulate the average ear height of a 3-year-old, an adult male and an adult female as well as her height at the beginning of the study: just over 4 feet. She also measured the loudness at the dryer’s air jet.
In the end, of the 23 models of hand dryer that Nora encountered in the wild, a single dryer manufactured by Comac was consistently quieter than 85 decibels at all positions. Others were below 90 decibels but still above the EPA’s threshold.
image credit: Balurbala via wikimedia commons
Source: neatorama