HSTOP Electric Air Duster: Amazon

I’m always trying to find ways to make regular car wash maintenance easier. One of the ways is being able to quickly dry your car after it has been washed. There’s of course the standard way of drying the car down with a microfiber drying towel. Another way is to do it with pressurized air.

If you didn’t know already, the only way you’re going to effectively blow water off of your vehicle after your car wash is if the car has some level of paint protection applied. This means a layer of wax, paint sealant, or something like a ceramic coating. You’ll get even better results if the car has gone through a proper detail, prior to the added protection. If you try blowing water off with air and you don’t have any protection on your car, it’s just going to blow water around and not actually blow off of your car, rendering it fruitless.

Typically with pressurized air, you can go with something like compressed air or my preferred method, a leaf blower (with a short attachment) for mobility. Leaf blowers are great, especially the ones that are battery powered: they are mobile and they are powerful.

Occasionally, I’ll see one of these random TikTok videos of a handheld blower that seems to have incredible power. I naturally assumed it to be a gimmick and forgot all about it. But my friend recently had one on a camping trip and it looked like it actually worked pretty well for cleaning out the tents.

So I figured, what the heck, I’ll give it a shot. I bought the same one that my friend had, which was the brand HSTOP. There are a bunch of different companies that sell these types of handheld blowers, but I suspect they are all very similar in operation and construction. This HSTOP Electric Air Duster sells for about $30 on Amazon.

This is how it comes in the box, the electric air duster, along with a charging cable.

Here are some additional close-up photos of the unit. It actually feels very substantial in the hand, very sturdy and nicely made. Although the form factor appears the same as any of those other blowers you see, they do have some slight aesthetic differences amongst them.

The front of the blower has buttons to control the LED flashlight and blower itself. On the backside, there is a button to control the intensity of the light or blower. None being too straightforward to use; personally they all felt a bit unintuitive to use. So, it takes a bit of getting used to—to figure out which button does what.

So how does it work? Well, when you run the blower on the highest setting, it gets high-pitched and loud, and it feels surprisingly powerful. I tried using it one of my cars that has a spray wax applied and the blower did an okay job on it. You can see the water being pushed along the surface, but because the air flow is concentrated into a narrow stream of air, it tends to push water around the surface of the car rather than blowing it effectively off the car.

So the blower can blow water around decently, just not effectively enough to get the water drops off of the car (which is what you want). If you compare its performance with that of a leaf blower, it pales in comparison. The difference here being that the leaf blower might have a similar speed at which it blows air, but the opening is much larger. If you compare the actual air moved in cubic feet per minute (CFM), the leaf blower blows significantly more air and in this case, more water than the HSTOP Electric Air Duster.

The CFM rating is probably the most important factor in being able to effectively blow water off of your car after a car wash. If you want to see what a leaf blower is capable of doing, check out the photo below. The leaf blower can easily blow practically every drop of water off the hood of this car.

The other disappointing thing that I found was that the battery life is not good. The handheld blower has a battery in it that is charged with the included USB-C cable. Even on a full charge, I can only blow some water around the perimeter of the car on its highest blow setting, and then the blower will shut off. Not good.

The result is that these little TikTok handheld air blowers are not going to be replacing battery-powered leaf blowers anytime soon. Those lithium ion battery-powered leaf blowers have much more capacity to move air and last longer than this tool does. What the HSTOP Electric Air Duster does have over the larger leaf blowers is the convenient size.

I can see myself grabbing this blower however if I wanted to supplement it with my normal drying towel. When you dry your vehicle with a microfiber drying towel, you might notice that there are certain areas on your particular vehicle that might collect water and slowly leak until it has evaporated (or dripped down off your car). This can be frustrating as you may have completely dried your car down with a drying towel, and later you might come back to seeing your car with water spots from the drip marks in those particular areas.

This tool could be useful after you’ve dried your car down with the drying towel in those areas that collect water. These areas that come to mind are the side view mirrors, door handles, headlights, tail lights, and any crevices. Blowing these areas with this tool could get all that residual water out, which you can then dry up again with your drying towel.

HSTOP Electric Air Duster: Amazon