Silenc­ing a hair dry­er (and oth­er house­hold stuff)?

My wife used a hair dry­er this morn­ing. Nor­mal­ly this is noth­ing worth to blog about, but after a night with not so much sleep (my child is get­ting sev­er­al new teeth at once and I took care about it this night) the sound of the hair dry­er was a bit annoy­ing, even if I was already prepar­ing me to go to work too.

At this point I sud­den­ly noticed, that I can not remem­ber to have seen a com­mer­cial of a hair dry­er where a low noise sound pres­sure lev­el is one of the impor­tant fea­tures. I also can not remem­ber that some­one things that this shall be changed. This is strange.

There is a lot of move­ment to make cars more silent. There is a lot of move­ment to lim­it the sound pres­sure lev­el of portable music play­ers (those where the music is con­sumed the most with head­phones). There are rules about the sound pres­sure lev­el at work. There are com­mer­cials which focus on the lack of loud noise from the dish­wash­er or the wash­ing machine, but I can not remem­ber to have seen putting the noise lev­el of a hair dry­er, a mix­er, a vac­u­um or some­thing sim­i­lar as a major fea­ture against a com­pe­ti­tion into a commercial.

When we are a bit late to go to work, my wife is some­times using the air con­di­tion­ing of the car as a hair dry­er (we dri­ve togeth­er, so no dan­ger on the road), and this is pro­duc­ing enough air­flow to dry the hairs while still not being as loud as a hair dry­er. Yes, the air­flow gen­er­ates some noise which you can not pre­vent, and the fans are more far away from the ear than it is the case with a hair dry­er (and it is not a low-class car), but if I look at the noise lev­el of qui­et fans in a PC, I am sure that it is pos­si­ble to cut the noise pres­sure lev­el of a hair dry­er. No high-frequent noise from the motor of the fan and a blade and case design which pro­vides a good air­flow while reduc­ing airflow-noise is possible.

As a hair dry­er is a device which is not far away from ears, I am sur­prised that there is not more inter­est (at least in var­i­ous tech­ni­cal standards-compliance def­i­n­i­tions and tests required by the gov­ern­ment) in this. Spe­cial­ly kids seem to agree that it is too loud.

Sim­i­lar for a vacuum.

And while we are at it, my moth­er is known to bake good cakes, she is bak­ing at least one cake per week and if there is some fes­tiv­i­ty (fam­i­ly, friends, neigh­bors) she is even bak­ing 5 – 6 cakes in a week. As such she is not using a cheap mix­er, she is using a qual­i­ty prod­uct with a sta­ble stand. Still, this device is mak­ing a lot of noise. A part of the noise is gen­er­at­ed by the motor (high fre­quen­cy, depends upon the speed of the mix­er) and if you real­ly want to speak about some­thing, you bet­ter go out of the kitchen.

I know, devices with a reduced noise lev­el a more expen­sive to cre­ate and build, but I can not real­ly believe that nobody would we will­ing to spend mon­ey for such a device. So, if you know a mar­ket­ing per­son of a man­u­fac­tur­er of such devices, please have a talk about a nice “our prod­uct is bet­ter than the one of the com­pe­ti­tion because it is more silent”-campaign with him/her.