Flick first.
Dry smarter.

Learn a habit. See your local progress.

Not yet available for public download.

Our education-first app focuses on flick-dry for hand-drying, uses the microphone to estimate hand-dryer running time, and asks whether each use included flick-dry. Select the same physical dryer to compare uses involving flick-dry or direct-dry, with per-use and cumulative estimated time and energy changes.

Measurements stay local to your phone. No raw audio is saved, and no account or upload server is required. An optional ZIP export lets you choose whether to email your measurements. Monitoring has a manual Stop control and an automatic timeout.

The app currently supports hand dryers only. Using paper towels? Follow the paper-towel steps.

Visiting science museums in different cities has always been part of my family vacation. After visiting so many science museums, the exhibits started to blend. However, one I still recall vividly was an exhibit about flicking excess water off your hands to use less paper to dry them. What struck me was the idea that such a small, seemingly insignificant action could have a meaningful impact. The specific museum and city have long since slipped my mind, but the idea the exhibit presented stayed with me. It made me wonder how I could apply this concept to a society increasingly dependent on electricity; in particular, I wondered how flicking excess water could reduce the energy consumption of electric hand dryers.

That question sparked the Flick-dry Initiative. After reviewing current research, I developed app prototypes and collected and analyzed data. The early app prototypes didn’t work. Rather than keep adjusting them, I switched to a data-driven approach: I recorded dryers running, labeled the data, and used those labels to develop the Flick First Dryer Verifier app. This approach produced a working tool for recording dryer running times and supporting comparisons between flick-dry and direct-dry trials.

My goal is to bring this work into public education. Online, through this website, the Flick-dry app, email, and social media, I want to help people around the world understand and try a simple habit. Locally, our volunteers visit businesses, schools, and community organizations to share it in person. By collaborating with them, I hope to turn the vision into practice—small changes in daily habits that make a big impact on resource savings.

While placing Flick-dry stickers with local businesses, our volunteers noticed that many of the washrooms they visited use paper towels, not hand dryers. That brought the project full circle—the museum exhibit that started it all was about using less paper. So this website now shows how to flick-dry with either a hand dryer or paper towels.