I did a building with three of these spaced around 150’ apart. To allow proper dry time to avoid spotting, i did a row, walked to the next curtain, did that one, then the next and finally walked back to the first. Basically each row required two football fields of walking and multiple times extending and collapsing the pole. It felt very inefficient.
How could i handle this better? What should i do if i only have one curtain to do with no nearby glass? Just do a row and twiddle my thumbs for five minutes before starting the next? I’m tempted next time to wfp until i can reach the rest with trad.
Run my DI tank before my buffer tank so I can rinse the whole thing down twice with the power washer with pure water.
Properly setup, I can see each curtain taking about 10-15 minutes to clean.
Setup the power wash trailer halfway between two curtains, to reduce setup time at each set of windows.
Apart from that, I’m struggling to think of a more efficient way to wfp. You might get away with scrubbing down all the frames really well first and do an initial scrub and rinse to get the majority of the dirt off the glass, letting it all drip dry, and then going back and wfp’ing all the glass in one shot.
I think it’s a pretty common misconception that you always have to let the top row/sash dry before you start on lower panes. Whether you’re talking commercial or residential windows.
If you scrub the frames good enough, and they’re clean, there should be no reason the top sash or frame can’t drip a bit while you keep moving on down.
It’s what I usually do, however…there are those jobs where the water runs behind the metal and no amount of rinsing/scrubbing helps…I always have to do significant touch-up or do trad.
Mind you, one of the curtains was double that size and there were spider nests in every corner so i spent about half the time trying to dig those out. It was a mess.
Sometimes I think we overthink things… sometimes an honest scrub and rinse are good enough in fact most times this is the case.
If you spent a half hour doing these like I would have done and did on the off chance get called back to clean up a drip, the half hour travel work time spent doing the redo would have still been less time than your six hours or whatever it was you spent doing it.
A stick on the end of your pole is great for scraping those out.
Also, this is another selling point on my power washing idea. The soap loosens those nests really well. And the force of the water when rinsing (even at low pressure) can usually dislodge the loosened nests.
I reread your original post: 3 curtains 150 feet apart. So I would have setup the washer at the middle one and reached all 3 from that location.
But as others have mentioned, sometimes we overthink these things. I would have at least attempted doing the whole curtain in one shot with my WFP, unless the glass was really filthy. Then it’s more efficient to break out the power washer and soap
Thing is, I’d frequently have problems with spotting until i started allowing more dry time. I’m afraid to go back to less. Is there some other trick to it maybe?
Do it the way seth says
If it’s really bad. I would just scrub Th hell out of it . Frames , An Glass ,rinse it, then start at The top again , An give it a final go …scrub an rinse !!
If your hanging around till it dries , An there are some spots. Use a green cleaning pad with spray way
Some great suggestions here^^. Clean frames and rinse glass on the way up, then scrub and rinse glass on the way down.
I didn’t mean to suggest earlier that this situation would require a power washer to clean effectively. I just like to be able to use whatever tools that are at my disposal to do the job in the most efficient way I can think of
It helps that my power washer is mounted on a trailer, and takes about as much time to setup as most people take setting up their RO/DI systems.
Didn’t know you got a wfp, Daniel. Nice addition to the arsenal!
And I agree from experience that scrubbing the frames and sills real well usually allows you to work down continuously.
Um… I think it took like six hours…
