Without a doubt, the key piece of equipment necessary for a good animal grooming outcome is a professional dryer. One selection of the right unit to use at the right time on the appropriate type animal coat will make the essential difference in a groomer’s professional standing and career prospects.

It will also determine a grooming salon’s business future and success. For without capable and superior equipment available for staff’s use, a grooming operation has little chance to tackle the more difficult, harder-to-efficiently-dry coat types that lead to the highest compensation and attract the best grooming professionals for the grooming salon staff.

There are four basic types of animal dryers used by groomers in the animal care industry, but only three are considered essential to a full service, professional salon and meeting today’s competitive and operational challenges. Long-term business success requires the most capable drying equipment to retain not only groomers, but also to attract and keep the most discerning, high-end clientele. Salon ownership needs to understand the efficiency needed in running a successful grooming business and the importance of choosing dryers that also provide for a healthier, safer and more comfortable grooming environment, which is one of the most important aspects in the selection process. After all, a grooming salon’s overall success has always been measured mostly on the day-to-day consistency of its personnel, its caring approach to animal care, and the sense of accomplishment and pride grooming professionals feel and show for a job well done.

The selection of the right animal dryers is but one step to a salon’s business success. Let’s investigate why the selection of your grooming force dryer may just be the most important of these steps and why health, safety, and comfort issues are becoming more of a major focus with present and future groomers as well as the retail public.

As we’ve mentioned above, there are four different types of dryer, with the handheld, low output dryer version that primarily is used for small, touch-up drying jobs at the grooming table being one of them. This dryer is awkward, underpowered, and a model type mostly like human handheld dryers that has little efficiency value for groomers. The review of the main essential dryer types will include not only the force dryer, but also the cage dryer and the finishing dryer, which are sometimes referred to as the “Three Pillars” of animal drying and are the mark of a truly professional full-service grooming establishment.

The force dryer, which provides high velocity or speed (rpm) is best at removing gross water from animals just out of the bathing tub after towel damping when heavier water droplets are most prevalent.

Even the shortest-coated critter requires at least one version of this force type unit which necessitates hands-on attention and a good knowledge and control of air speed and air volume to effectively dry animal coats that vary widely in coat texture and drying time and challenges complete drying in a minimum amount of time. These units remove gross water with velocity being the major factor in their overall success. But this unit type is much weaker in the production of air volume which is primarily needed for dense, thick, more difficult-to-dry coats, where deep penetration is required to dry the coat thoroughly.

These force units generally are the loudest of the dryer family and use the most electricity and require a single 20+ Amp electrical circuit capacity, especially 2-motor models most commonly used in the bathing/tub area.

Older force dryers use high speed (rpm) carbon brush motors and come with one- or two-motor setup with the two-motor version mostly utilized at the tub. This type unit is louder, producing higher heat output and consumes much larger amounts of electricity requiring at times outlets with 30 Amp electrical capacity for uninterrupted operation.

Two-motor units arranged in tandem and those with small air outlets as well as angled tubing are less efficient per motor in air speed and air flow delivery than an identical single-motor version. But they do marginally deliver larger air volume than a single motor with their high-velocity output.

The newest addition in force dryers utilizes the innovative, breakthrough development motor sometimes referred to as the direct current (DC), carbon free motor that is starting to dominate the high performance appliance industry. We will cover this dryer type in a future presentation.

Owners and users of force air dryers should clearly understand that force dryers will seldom succeed in producing a thorough enough dried canine or feline coat ready for scissoring, clipping, or anything close to a final state ready for finishing. Further drying at the grooming table or use of a cage unit or finish dryer will most likely be needed.

The thicker, single- and doubled-coated animals cannot be efficiently or effectively dried by a force unit alone, wasting grooming time and requiring extra manpower to satisfactorily conduct a complete drying process. Force dryers, especially the 2-motor type with massive airflow cannot adequately penetrate since once the gross water droplets are eliminated, drying will become a much longer proposition.

This high velocity force dryer will begin to dry the deep coats at a much slower rate. At this stage of drying, a much higher volume of air delivered at a slower velocity is needed to penetrate these coats and greatly reduce the overall process to a much more efficient process.

For an efficient and effective salon drying evolution, while also maximizing profitability and grooming personnel compensation, ownership cannot rely on air velocity alone.

A grooming operation in the animal care industry must collect the best family of dryers in order to reduce time spent and widen your customer base since the most difficult coats to dry generally are the ones returning the highest financial return.

Top groomers are well aware of how drying only with a force dryer can complicate things and cause added time to correct the extra matting, flatten coats, uneven drying, etc. which will adversely affect the “finished ready” coat condition needed for a top-notch, “best in show” end product.

What to look for in a force dryer that is best suited for your grooming needs and a detailed suggestion criteria will be addressed in a future “SEES” recommendation.

Next, we will cover the remaining numbers of the “Three Pillars” family of professional animal drying equipment which will include both cage dryers and finish dryers.

Till Next Time,
The Professor