Well, this is fresh on my mind, because I just did this.
Take a 55 gallon drum (nice to have one laying around) and a 5 gallon bucket. For this experiment, the barrel will start empty, and the bucket will start full with water. While doing this, “practice like you play” meaning don’t deviate from your normal setup. Use your normal hose length, your normal lance/gun, your normal soap tip, etc. If you start cutting corners from the norm, expect different results - ie. if you did this just ballvalving your experiment would be s*** because there would be no pressure compared to your normal operation and you would walk away with a different outcome.
Put your soap line (from your injector) into the bucket. Start Downstreaming into the 55 gallon drum until it is full. Here’s where you need to do some math.
If you fill up the drum with 55 gallons, and the 5 gallon bucket of water (mock soap) is gone, that means you have 50 gallons of water to 5 gallons of “soap” in your mix. That’s 10:1. That’s 9.09% mix. If you are using 12.5% to start, and you are mixing it 10:1 (9.09%) then the end result (what is actually hitting the house) is 1.125% concentration.
If you did the experiment and had 2.5 gallons gone out of the bucket by the time you filled up the 55 gallon drum, you would have 2.5 gallons soap to 52.5 gallons water. That’s 21:1. That’s 4.54%. If you were downstreaming 12.5% at 4.54% concentration that would put the end result of what is hitting the house at 0.567%.
You can do this experiment a ton of different ways. If you have a barrel laying around, it was very effective for me.
Also, I formed my method based on posts shared from Brodie, Racer, and the like - I just put my own spin on it. Props to you guys who have really helped me out!
In Arkansas, we have a website www.arcountydata.com. It is a website used for all tax and real estate records, which, by law, are public domain and knowledge. I can’t speak for your area, but legally, this information should be available to you.
For me, when a customer calls, I collect their name and address, and some other details. Usually, before we are off the phone, I have looked up their house in the tax records and I know of their assessed square footage and the size of their garage.
Don’t forget about the garage, you are going to be expected to wash it, but no homeowner would think to include that sqft. Because what they remember is the square footage that was told to them when they purchased the home, which is always “livable” square footage.
Furthermore, to Racer’s point about gutters, I haven’t put anything more than a gutter brush and house wash mix on gutters all year (1st and only year). I assumed I would be doing alot more gutter restoration but people don’t seem to care about anything more than the very reasonable results a house wash mix will provide. I advertise “80-90% improvement to the gutters with this service” when quoting a house wash.
Also, porch area is not included in the tax records…and porches have impact on my price because they are a pain.
I will give an example…guy called me yesterday morning…lives in Baltimore and wants me to wash a house on his family homeplace in south Ga. He sent pics to my phone…I saw what seemed like a considerable amount of porch. I looked up the tax records and the house has 1483 sq ft…google showed there is just under 3000ft under roof…so, he did not get a small house price.
So I once again feel like I may be leaving money on the table because of this post. I DO NOT offer window cleaning with my house wash or as an added service. I normally do not have spotting or at least have any customers complain about spotting after I’m done. Would I need a WFP and a large DI water tank to have this as an option? How much DI water does it take per window on average?
Depends on water quality in your area. WCR has tons and tons of info on waterfed. All a matter of how far down that rabbit hole you want to go.
Post-housewashing waterfed work is the easiest window cleaning I do. I just blew through what would usually be $150+ in windows in under an hour. But because this customer is getting the full service with windows cleaned perfectly in & out plus screens washed, the total ticket will be around $950. $550 for the housewash, close to $500 for the windows, minus a combined service discount of $100. The exterior windows take me almost twice as long if I haven’t power washed first, so I think the combo discount is more than fair to both myself and the customer.
All I’ve got left is to clean the interiors and reinstall the screens. That usually takes me a couple hours at this job.
It’s not as much as I could make in a full day of power washing, but it’s way more than I make in a day of window cleaning, and much easier on the body. If it wasn’t for the interiors, I could do two jobs like this in a day and clear $1400.
Oh, and to answer your question on water consumption, I used around 15-20 gallons to clean this place. There are 56 tall but narrow casement panels, plus a couple garage doors. So maybe 1 qt per pane. I tend to use slightly more on double hungs and french panes, but I also get more for them.
I started small this year just to test the waters on window cleaning. I only invested about 150 bucks and am perfecting the technique old school before I go crazy spending 3k on a wfp system and a screen rinser. It’s been a nice change of pace. It’s also been lucrative this far at least. It’s a nice upsale.
The screen washer is nice, but completely superfluous if you’re going to be power washing. I did about 40-50 screens in around 5 minutes while I was washing the house. They would’ve taken close to 20 minutes with my Aztec. They come out cleaner than if I used the screen washer, too.
Good advise. Seemed like the screens turned a little grey at my house when I hit them with the ball valve with little to no pressure. I assumed that’s why window cleaners used a screen rinser.
I have a screen cleaninng machine… its called the aztec screen cleaner…its absolutely unreal and I would recommend it to anyone who has screen cleaning as a service. The customers love it cause it looks cool and neighbours actually come over to ask about it and then ask for your services. Look it up, its amazing.
