How many of you clean old true-divided windows and/or storm windows with pure water systems.
I just did a house recently that would have taken me twice as long last year doing it trad. True divided 8 over 8 windows with storms. All the windows had hard-water stains. My method was to use a ladder and apply one restore with 6 inch scrubber to all the pains and then rinse them off and scrub them with a handheld vikan brush. I couldn’t believe how fast this worked compared to how I did it before.
One of the issues I had, however was that some of the sills filled up pretty fast. I have noticed working with the old windows that often the drain holes get clogged up (on the triple track storms) and sometimes it doesn’t even have drain holes.
I have actually had customers with old windows fogging up ask me to enlarge the drain holes a bit with a drill and it definitely eased the fogging. Do any of you ever drill larger drain holes or drill new drain holes on the triple track frame?
Seems like that would facilitate the draining of the water when using a wfp.
I have been doing an enormous house with 12/12’s that are in very good condition with a wfp for three years. Enormous time savings there. They drain well at that house.
In early Spring I was strong and eager to bronze wool. Now after 3 months of crazy busy work, I have no will or ability to scrub hard all day lol
Necessity is the mother of invention. When you’re too tired / overworked to rely on muscle, you start to look for other solutions.
Interesting feedback on the draining. I haven’t had too much issue with this, but I am glad to know that slightly drilling out an already existing drain hole will fix a slow drainer.
This is right up my alley, as half of my work is old windows
So, our method for old windows w/ storms (and usually clogged weepholes) goes like this:
Fan jets are a must. Lower water pressure out of the brush as well.
The first step is to simply wet and scrub the windows. We us the tiniest bit of water just to get the window wet, then crimp the hose while scrubbing to reduce the chance of sill flooding.
Then we give a quick first rinse.
I’ll usually do about 5 windows with this method, then turn around and head back to the first window and give a thorough rinse. This reduces what I call “ghosts”, aka the residue film that is left behind on old windows after the first rinse. We use caution not to go too far up into the top glazing, so that the glazing doesn’t leave “ghosts” again.
This will usually leave the windows looking great. Every once in a while we’ll have to touch up some of the top panes with some Ecover solution on a rag at the top of a long channel, but its usually not much.
In regards to the hard water staining usually found on the bottom sash, we charge extra for removing that. Most people don’t bite at paying the extra charge, as once the screen is in they’re not really going to see the hard water stains.
Any water left in a sill with clogged weepholes is dried up immediately by whoever is working the interiors. Sills can leak into the house, and that’s just plain embarrassing. usually you’ll get some sort of drainage out of an old sill, and it seems that the older they are and the worse shape they’re in, the easier they weep.
I forgot to mention how I clean storms. I clean them first before the windows.
I take out the 2 storms and the screen outside and stack it against my little giant to prop them up. I use the vikan handheld brush to clean the storms and screens.
I let them dry then when I’m done with the window cleaning I inspect the storms and reclean them quickly with a spray bottle of 1/4 rubbing alcohol to 3/4 DI water. A couple spritz with the alcohol cleaner and a quick buff with a terry cloth or scrim and anything the WFP didn’t clean will come off.
Even after WFP the storms, they still need a little buffing but it saves a ton of time compared to cleaning all the stoms with mop and squeegee.
Plus the hand held brush rinses all the gunk out of the tab mechanism of the storm - that’s a real pita if you’re cleaning them by hand.
[MENTION=4338]CapeCodCleaner[/MENTION], Man, you’re really thinking outside the box. Do you think your method would work with the IPC or Aztec screen cleaners? Hook up a DI tank and go to town
[MENTION=4338]CapeCodCleaner[/MENTION], Man, you’re really thinking outside the box. Do you think your method would work with the IPC or Aztec screen cleaners? Hook up a DI tank and go to town
I’m definitely interested in getting an Aztec screen washer at some point. I don’t know if you’d see any difference using pure water for screens though. I just use the vikan brush because I’m already right there cleaning the storms - no extra steps. The triple track screens are usually pretty small also.
If I had a bunch of full sized screens I would rather have a machine.
What would be a great idea is to hook the Aztec Screen Washer up to a DI filter and just run the storms through. That might be what you are saying. Like a car wash for storm windows.
I just Blot and wring with a microfiber . I use a dry microfiber the last time and that thing is clean and pretty.
What caught my attention is all the in and out with dirty and then drippy storms and screens. Doesnt that make an awful mess in your customers House ? Even if done very carefully thats an awful lot of in and out, which is messy period. I put the storms in front of each window on 2 towels per window to protect the floors. Clean the screens the same way you clean the windows. Comes out great !! No mess only entered house once
In the old days , pre WFP , it was even cleaner as I didnt take the storms out at all. I did the “triple pull” moving 2 storms and screen from the outside. Very clean like that as any dust is confined in the sill. Did it that way for 30 years off a 24 Werner.
Thank G-D for WFP. I dont even take my ladders off the truck most days. Only for very horizontal skylights. My 35 extreme allows me to work almost horizontally over 20 feet of roof with the ultra light flocked brush on it there is almost zero bend. I ve learned how to pre wash and dig on the problem areas from this 30 foot distance. I have to have the ground clearance though, this is another time I take down the ladder, maybe 3 times a month. This is only because of the equipment. Not possible with 4 of the seven poles in my truck. No swivel way to much bend way to heavey a brush, no horizontal control with these poles at all. Also the extreme low flow water output makes it so theres no splash and the windows are error free
exactly what I was thinking. I had thought of it before, but was worried about little drips and stuff. Your alcohol/pure water solution would negate those concerns. Then there’s the issue of draining the frames out sufficiently. I’m already in the habit of tilting screens up at an angle so the frames drain, so it wouldn’t be much different there. It would just mean being more careful to make sure they don’t fall over. And then you just gotta remember to rinse both sides of the glass
Looks like a great idea to make a wfp storm window washer. I don’t see any issue as far as it being messy. Yes, bringing nasty storm windows through the house, you could end up having some debris drop onto the floor. I put a section of dropcloth down on the floor, pull out the storms for a few rooms place each set onto the drop cloth. Then I pull the dropcloth around the stack of storms like a burrito and carry the tidy bundle through the house so nothing can fall out of the little cradle of filth lol
Cleaning the storms with wfp first thing then letting them dry, I haven’t had any problem with them dripping as I put carry them back into the house a few hours later.
The two houses I have done this to thus far have been colonial style (basically a big box) houses with very simple floor plans. If I was cleaning a large house with lots of twists and turns and even a couple different sizes of storm windows, then it may be too much of a logistics headache to take all the storms outside.
I may have second thoughts also if the house was covered with wall to wall white carpet. However, nearly all the houses I clean have hardwood floors so I don’t have to be that ocd about a speck of storm window nastiness falling.
The reason I touch the windows up a little after I have pure water cleaned them is mostly from the paint that bleeds. The old storm windows usually have oxidized paint on the frames but also dirt that gets jammed up into the frames. This weeps out a little after they dry in the hot sun and there is a little touch up involved - 20-30 seconds per windows.
Overall, I think it definitely saves time cleaning the windows this way as opposed to trad.
The screen washer would just make this same process even more efficient, hopefully.
Great minds think alike, [MENTION=3471]Alex Lacey[/MENTION]
Rereading my post it sound kinda critical. Sorry about that. I just think that pulling the storms is a piece of work, but carrying them outside is 5x that. Why not just clean them right there? I get great results on the screens with the strip washer and microfiber and it doesn’t make dust. I ve washed them like that since 1979. I do hundreds of these old houses and always get called back. Why work that hard? Besides that you ve got to keep the order right cause after that many years in the frames, they,re not really inter changeable.
I follow your posts and have learned from you. The 3rd story label scrape was very interesting. Pull the storms, don’t flip em and wash them in the sills. Outsides from the top down from behind. Ya gotta do that odd little detail at the bottom and close out corner but it’s still less work than flipping or especially carrying it.gosh. Josh
I have been cleaning old windows with triple track storms for 2 years and I have never had any issue with storms not being interchangeable. Of course, their are the 2 different sized storms per each window which need to go into their correct respective tracks. However, why won’t 2 storms go into the window next to them if they are in the correct track? They are the exact same size?
The triple track storms I clean seem interchangeable… unlike Millgard screens.
No, just brainstorming different approaches to a task. It may not make sense to a solo guy to take the storms out of the house to clean them. His method has, no doubt, been efficiently streamlined from years of practice. But, what about an employee who has been working for you 3-4 months and has only cleaned new windows previously. Do you spend 2 days practicing with them teaching instructing them on the finer points of shuffling the storms when they may not see another old house for a few months or is it easier to have them on the deck washing storms with a wfp factory production style?
It’s like the debate with little giant vs. sectionals. What a seasoned pro prefers is not the same as what will be easiest and most intuitive for an “average employee.” I’m always thinking as I build my business, “how can I make this so nearly anyone can do it.”
For example if you can clean windows with technique A and make $50 per man hour or you can clean windows with technique B and make $70 per man hour, it’s a no brainer that technique A is the way to go if you are a solo guy.
But what if technique A is easiest enough so that you can plug in the average employee with minimal training and start getting $50 per man hour but technique B takes additional training and lots of practice. What do you choose then?
Keeping it simple for a 1 man operation is different than keeping it simple for a multi-employee operation is it not?
Jesse: So you’re going to play the seasoned pro card to butter me up. Haha
I still disagree. I like the way Long’s Window Care does things. They are big, about 10 guys, very simple methods, and extremely efficient. I like the way they do combination storms, because they ALL get done the same way. They do well over one thousand homes a year and everything is done a certain way, so there is no room for error. Haha
