THE RECORD

931individual tests
226locations, five states and D.C.
1,076culture dishes
462timed drying trials
11published works with permanent DOIs
1.3 TBchain-of-custody images, video, and data

The complete underlying record is public at handdryerstudy.com, with the published papers on Zenodo and the Harvard Dataverse and redundant chain-of-custody hosting at Backblaze and Cloudflare.

SOURCE MATERIAL

Documentary films
The study record
The legal record
The case explained
Forensic Dryer Group

THE CASES

Blouch v. NSF International, et al.
U.S. District Court, M.D. Pa.
No. 1:26-cv-02529-SES

Blouch v. Starbucks Corporation
Cumberland County C.C.P.
No. 2026-10041-0

MEDIA CONTACT

Ronald A. Blouch Jr.
Hand Dryer LLC
107 E Locust Street
Mechanicsburg, PA 17055
(717) 319-2550
contact@handdryerllc.com

About the researcher

Ronald A. Blouch Jr. is an eleven-time entrepreneur, 8 successful. He is a Navy trained radar technician who served in the Persian Gulf during the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1980. He is an audiovisual technician, a certified remodeling contractor, and owned a yoga studio and taught meditation for eight years in the '10s. His adult son got an invitation to attend Virginia Tech in 1999 in part as a result of the public science project he did with his father's help. A generation later, beginning with a science experiment done with his then 11 year old daughter in 2023, he built the largest independent dataset ever assembled on hand dryer contamination, function, failure, and environmental and human impact, published it in full, and filed suit in federal and state court on the record it produced. He counted approximately 50,000 bacterial and fungal colonies by hand, in pen, on printed photographs of the dishes. You can see them at Backblaze and Cloudflare and count them yourself. Every testing decision, excluded sample, and corrected error is documented in the public record.