The £999 tap and hand-dryer (and you don't even get soap): Dyson's latest design reinvents washing your hands

It doesn’t look particularly out of the ordinary. But there are a few rather significant differences between this tap and the ones you normally find in a bathroom – not least the £999 price tag.
Dreamt up by James Dyson, the man who re-invented the vacuum cleaner, it combines hand washing and drying in one rather futuristic tap. 
First, the user must place their hands under the central nozzle, which breaks an infra-red beam and triggers a stream of lukewarm water.

Next, the user moves their hands out underneath the two wings, where breaking a second beam sets off a blast of cold filtered air to scrape the water away. 
The drying process takes 12 seconds, and there is no need to touch any surfaces that might spread bugs.
There is one thing it doesn’t dispense, however – soap.

While the Dyson bagless vacuum cleaner became a mass market success despite its relatively high price, the Dyson  Airblade Tap is likely to be more of a niche product, at least in the short term. 
Its big innovation is the small and immensely powerful fan motor, called the V4, which sits in the  base of the tap.

Mass market success: The tap and hand-dryer was dreamt up by James Dyson, the man who invented the bagless vacuum cleaner

High performance: Mr Dyson said the Dyson Airblade hand dryers dry hands quickly and that the digital motor self adjusts 6,000 times a second to maintain optimum efficiency

The 1600 watt motor is just 85mm across and weighs 675g, yet it is able to power a tiny fan from standstill to 90,000 revolutions per minute in less than 0.7 seconds. As a result, it can blast out 30 litres of air a second, travelling at 430mph.

'Most simply give up': Conventional hand dryers use one column of bacteria filled bathroom air to evaporate water from hands

Air sucked into the Airblade passes through a filter to remove 99.9 per cent of all bacteria before it dries the hands.
The combined tap and fan is one of three new hand dryers developed by a team of 125 Dyson engineers at its headquarters in Wiltshire.
Mr Dyson said: ‘Conventional hand-dryers use one column of bacteria filled bathroom air to evaporate water from hands, after much hand rubbing.
‘Most people simply give up. Dyson Airblade hand dryers dry hands quickly. Sheets of high  velocity unheated air travel through tiny apertures at 430mph, quickly scraping water from hands like a windscreen wiper, leaving them fully dry. 
‘Using complex computer modelling Dyson engineers have developed a high performance digital motor. 
‘The Dyson digital motor self-adjusts 6,000 times a second to maintain optimum efficiency to create high velocity sheet of air that dries hands quickly and hygienically.’ 
The new motor came after seven years of design and experimentation, which required an investment of £26.9million.