What’s interesting about window cleaning preferences is that they are often regional. I have a lot of houses here in the Northeast that are filled with french panes of different sizes. A lot of those old true divided windows have caulk, sealers and paint on the glass. I often need razors, steel or bronze wool, and magic erasers. It also really helps having an assortment of small channels in the common sizes.
The old northeast houses usually have hardwood floors with oriental rugs. You can push a little cart like this rather easily around the rugs on the hardwood.
On the west coast, window cleaning was a much simpler affair. 98% of the houses I cleaned had new 1 over 1 windows (I never even came across any storms), many of the houses had wall to wall carpeting which would make pushing a cart around much harder.
He Man’s tote NO BUCKET WINDOW CLEANING TOTE. - YouTube would work really well in those homes.
From my experience, window cleaning techniques and preferences are very regional and for good reason. Even how many windows you can wet before squeegeeing depends on the regions humidity. I’ve seen a few videos from this very impressive UK window cleaner where he wets about 15 storefront windows before he pulls out his squeegee.
There’s no way you could do that in Arizona - too dry.
A lot of it also just boils down to preference. There are the minimalists who prefer to carry the least amount of items on them and there are the “kitchen sink” folks who like having every possible tool on them just in case. The longer I have been doing physical work, the lazier I have become. I would rather push around a cart than have to go all the way out to my truck or even to a customer’s lobby where I put my bin.
Some of the houses I have worked in would take 5 minutes just to walk all the way through their massive house to get to the lobby.
As far as looking “professional”, I think that that too varies by region. In Seattle, you can be a graphic designer or computer programmer and have full sleeve tattoos (so long as they are high quality and artistic looking) whereas in another region of the country such a look would be viewed with with suspicion or even outright derision.
Similarly, with regards to “uniforms”, different regions have different attitudes as to what a proper “uniform” is. I notice in the humid Southern United States that a lot of window cleaners have polyester cool-max high performance sportswear type shirts with their company name embroidered on them. In this region that is the professional look.
In other areas synthetic fabrics are seen as a fashion faux pas and will lower you in the customer’s esteem rather than elevate. I wear a cotton polo shirt with no company name or my own name embroidered on it for high end homes in my area.
I don’t know how this monologue touched on all these topics (must be this new columbian coffee I’m drinking this morning :)) - I’m just reiterating that what works in one area for one p[erson may not work in another area for another person.
PITA :mad:
