Roomie’s daughter loves to make smoothies. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Thus, several times a week the question pops into my head, “How far are we from quiet blender technology?” Best news would be that we’ve already acheived it and Dopers can recommend a specific product I can get her for her birthday (or I can get her for my birthday).
If it doesn’t yet exist, gotta ask why. Surely this would be a much more useful invention than 97.4% of the unused features on my cell phone.
Also interested parties: Acoustic Singer-Songwriters who play in coffee shops (in addition to the quiet blender, they’d also like a quiet cappuccino machine).
They’ve certainly made a quiet dishwasher. Those things used to be outrageous, and now they purr. Probably they’ve got a quiet blender. But maybe not. Maybe some things just aren’t meant to be – like flying to Europe in three hours. We figured out how to get that done almost fifty years ago, but have decided it was a bad idea, and we should go back to seven hours minimum.
As an Engineer, I find this an interesting question.
Blenders are loud for a variety of reasons:
Big motors, which tend to have fans to keep them cool. The fans make noise.
Gear drive, resulting in gear noise. This could be reduced with higher quality gear trains.
Spinning blades, which make noise just like fans do.
The action of blending itself, which is those blades beating on the blendee.
A more expensive drive, with better muffling, could reduce 1 & 2.
To reduce 3 & 4 would take a sound-deadening blending container, which is likely to be bigger and heavier than current ones. So, it could probably be done, but it might make the unit too big and expensive for most people.
At the risk of injecting sense into this discussion, a soundproof bedroom would probably be a better solution to this and myriad other noise pollution problems.
