About a month ago, anticipating a little slowdown for the Fall I pivoted and started advertising window cleaning a little more than house washing. The house washing work is still rolling in but definitely has dropped down since the April - July mayhem but the window cleaning has taken off this Fall. Its completely filled in the lost revenue from the drop off in house washing and I’ve gotta admit cleaning glass is a nice change of pace to house washing. Certain unique satisfaction comes from cleaning glass. And the money isn’t bad. For a full house all the glass its less $$$ than a house wash but it takes about the same time give or take 90 minutes. Its just the way I price it, I could see pricing it a little higher if you wanted but there’s a certain implicit assumption I think that glass cleaning is going to come in lower than house washing.
Anybody else pivot like this during the year?
Here’s a typical house around here. We sure do love our glass around these parts
Been window cleaning since 1996, it typically pays about $100/hr compared to roughly $300 for PW. I can’t quit WC though, it dovetails into everything else I do.
what’s your setup like? I put a couple big blues together for sediment –> carbon filter then I run through a extra low pressure 4x40 RO membrane then into a final 4x40 resin canister which empties into a 10 gallon tank with a hudson that I have my remco 5gpm pull from and push into a hose reel with 200’ of 3/8” soft wash hose and I have a suttner gun at the end with jrod. All bolted to my truck, I just have to run the supply hose to the house same as I do with house washing. I want to get a WFP but I already had a nice carbon fiber trad pole for painting stuff so I just spray the windows with the DI water to lube them up, scrub them to loosen, final rinse with the DI water to clean them.
I think my area people are generally willing to pay more for window cleaning than the differential you mention but yeah its definitely skewed in favor of house washing making more money per contact hour. Its also a good bit easier physically to house wash vs window cleaning, at least with the way I’m doing…
Be curious how you run things though since you’ve been doing it for a long ■■■ time!
Ahh, I see, old school. I like that but I think that’s why you’re seeing such a price differential though. 1:3 price difference is insane to me! I don’t think I would do it if it were like that. I don’t like to discuss prices because its awkward because your region is probably not like mine but I get 2:3 ratio still in favor of house washing being more lucrative but not as drastic a difference as you’re noticing. I can do an entire side of a house let’s say 8 windows from 1 story to 2.5 stories in under 15 minutes. No ladders usually. Just carbon fiber pole work and spraying DI water with remco 12v setup. Glass comes out sparkling clean with a light abrasive pad on the pole. Average house takes me 90 minutes by the time you factor in setup/cleaning/talking to customer building rapport/getting paid. Its about the same time as it takes to wash a house but the pay is lower. I just schedule 4 window jobs a day instead of 3 house washing jobs a day so I make about the same amount of money its just a slightly longer day.
Do you have to use ladders for anything at height?
Do you think the WFP doesn’t do as good a job as trad method at the actual cleaning?
I’m always here to learn so if you’re recommending I get some trad tools and do that then I’ll experiment. I used to clean mid rises on rap with a bucket, scrubber, and squeegee. No way to WFP a 15 story building, although I did see Xero has a NINETY FOOT WFP!!!
‘Trad’ as they call it now will always be better quality than cheating, aka WFP. Think about this, if you’re 20’ away from a window, how can you tell if it’s truly clean?
I only use my DI pole for stuff I can’t/won’t reach with a ladder…which is getting increasingly more often as my joints yell at me.
I’m going to brush up on my old school squeegee technique. You’ve inspired me. If anything I think it would just be a fun thing to bust out in front of a customer for those low level ground picture windows to impress them lol
But with the DI water, I just trust the process that its clean, you’re right if you’re up close and personal then its easier to instantly verify whether its clean. If anything I go a few seconds longer on the DI water and watch it sheet off a little longer than I probably need to just to make sure.
You have to have an abundance mindset, my brother. There’s plenty of glass to go around to be cleaned!
If you operate with a scarcity mindset then you’ll be competitive and fear based in your thinking rather than calm collaborative and at peace and the energy you could have used to elevate yourself (which would incidentally solve the competition problem for you by pushing you to another level that the herd isn’t at) will be spent worrying about others. Don’t sleep on THAT, Narcos, its not trivial.
I don’t. I don’t like to be inside people’s homes, feels like too much of a liability and also adds another layer of coordination with the job because then they have to be home to give me access.
Probably half my window cleaning jobs have been on empty homes while people are working or vacationing or at another one of their homes.
I’ll have to push back a little on this. We’ve tested this out on the field. Done half of the windows trad and half wfp. Followed by 2 of us that didn’t know which were done by which, going around and checked nose to glass all of the windows after everything dried. We could not tell at all which ones were which, they were all equally clean with the exception of one or two marks left by the squeegee.
There is technique to doing wfp though. And just like trad, if you don’t do it properly, you will end up with subpar results. But ultimately, if the technician is well trained, wfp will leave a spotless, 100% clean window.
There are days that we do easily over 100 windows per day. So the test sample I’m basing this off is fairly large. I haven’t actually counted but I’m confident we do 10s of thousands of windows per year.
Depends on the window. Here in Louisville it’s mostly single/double hung so the screens have to come out from the inside and I just tilt them in while I’m there. Half of them have hardened fallout, the one I did today needed multiple passes of my Triumph razor and even then it didn’t quite get it all. Throw in a bunch of artillery fungus and bug crap, WFP won’t touch it. I have to get the sills anyway.
I have one house that is two stories and is flat glass outside that I do twice a year with my WFP. They recently had the house painted so I had to break out the 24’ ladder and hand clean every single one.
I’m not dissing RO/DI as it has its place it’s just not for me in this area, we do a lot of NASTY houses.
I don’t remove screens. I inform them about that beforehand. If they want to remove the screens then I welcome that but if they’re on when I get there then that window gets a DI water spray and that’s it and I move on. Its a moot point anyway because most of the homes I work on have huge picture windows. Today I was pretty dialed. I had 3 houses and each took sub 60 minutes.
Here’s an example. Screens aren’t really a thing on this kind of house.
That’s nice. It seems like every time someone asks if I clean windows, they expect inside and out for like $5–10 a window. For me, it’s just not worth the extra stress and headache.
