#ohbrother
Gary: Is it possible for all the glass in a home to be fine except for one or two pieces of glass? Everybody’s happy until one of your guys gets to the 20th piece of glass and then destruction strikes.
Happens a lot - even in buildings.
Tempered glass defects don’t exist in annealed glass, and maybe the first 19 were annealed.
(I try to avoid using the terms glass and tempered glass interchangeably, so it’s clear which I’m talking about.)
Even if it’s all tempered, you have a number of variables.
1 - A least half the time NOTHING will happen if you’re cleaning both sides of single pane poor quality tempered glass. That’s because roller side fabricating debris defects only occur on one side.
2 - that tempered glass isn’t necessarily all from the same source or facility. In fact, the more elaborate the home, the more likely there are several sources.
As for finding a problem on the 20th tempered window, sometimes there’s dumb luck involved.
A while ago I cleaned an entire building with tempered glass, starting right next to the main entrance and working my way around.
For whatever reason, I decided to save the entrance for last - and wouldn’t you know the entrance was the only place where it sounded bad when I scraped.
Perhaps the only way to TEST the glass and know for SURE that ALL the glass in the building is safe to scrape would be to scrape every square inch of every piece of glass in the building. Come back in three days when the sun is low in the sky and check the windows with a magnifying glass for scratches. If they’re not scratched you know it’s safe to use a razor. The microscope idea would take weeks. I miss the good old days. Haha 
I’m sure you realize that if you scrape everything, that’s not a test.
It would be sorta like drinking an entire cup of coffee to see if it was hot.
You wouldn’t necessarily have to test every inch of every window - just a statistically viable sample of the roller side of every batch of tempered glass represented in the building. (You’d have to learn exactly what that meant - statistically viable.)
Not every brand - every batch. (Unless the fabricator assures you they never maintain any of their furnaces.)
But if you couldn’t tell which of a company’s 27 furnaces did the tempering, or whether it was done at the same time, you might have to test all of theirs.
And wait.
Or get a waiver signed and get to work.
Ok, i think i get it now. Get a waiver and start scraping if needed. If i hear FD… STOP!! Go to the next pane. And my waiver should state that they have no idea if there is FD on their glass and have never tested it and I have warned them about all types of FD on all types of FT glass. How does that sound?
I promised I wouldn’t bother you anymore so if this bothers you I will erase it… Does that mean you should test the corner of the window before doing the entire window?
Ya I know.
Jaran: That’s a really good idea! Most of us start scraping in the middle of the window.
Nice to see your posts Mike.
You should probably also warn the customer that you won’t be doing any testing.
They should not assume you can hear everything that might cause a problem, or that because you hear something, there will objectionable damage - right away, or later, when tempered glass scratches have had a chance to chip out.
They should have agreed that you go ahead and clean everything, and not hold you responsible.
If you get worried and you want to stop, because you don’t trust the paper that promises they won’t hold you responsible, then you should stop.
If I’m cleaning a building with a million bucks worth of glass and I start seeing scratches, I’m gonna worry about that waiver.
(And it wouldn’t take a million to worry me.)
And if I wanted to stop, they would have to make damn sure I felt secure about proceeding.
But ideally you should work out what’s supposed to happen ahead of time, whether you want to stop, or whether the builder wants you to stop.
How much will you get paid when you stop?
Is the balance of the contract void if in the middle of the job they decide they want to switch from cleaning with scrapers to toothbrushes?
Toothbrushes? Is this where the thread takes a turn and alternative methods are discussed? Gary … You were making fun of wooling the windows, right?
Nope - that remark was about who why all of a sudden the window cleaner has to work harder for less money.
I guess I’m more interested in helping window cleaners who own scrapers stay out of trouble - whether they use them or not.
The problem is that even if you have the contractor (for example) sign your waiver, the homeowner could still sue you later. Yeah, you might win on the strength of the waiver and the FD evidence. But the hassle and headache and legal costs could be disastrous. I walked off of a huge CCU job last year for that exact reason, because the first two windows we scraped on the outside scratched. It was $100k worth of windows, that I didn’t feel like getting sued over.
The judge can decide that a waiver is not fair and the customer will win. I use to be a carpet and uphostery cleaner and we all knew that our damage waivers are worthless pieces of paper in court. Your state may be be different than Massachusetts.
May I ask - do you feel this is a sound reason to not have a heat treated tempered glass scratch waiver?
(Or, did you have a signed waiver?)
Not gonna say you’re wrong to walk if doesn’t seem right - and I realize anybody can try to sue you, even your Dad.
But it’s my understanding only the building contractor answers directly to the homeowner.
(If the builder were NOT on the hook, they would always sign the waiver and let the homeowner come after you).
In a situation like that, what do you tell the customer?
I did have a waiver signed by builder.
I think if window cleaners treat a waiver like a joke, they’re probably asking for trouble.
Show it to your lawyer, ask them to make it workable, and learn how to avoid making promises that contradict what you put in the contract.
I believe one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to promise it’s OK if they sign the waiver, because you’re going to somehow make sure nothing happens.
Maybe you assured them you were trained to find fabricating debris, or that you’re a scraping expert - or you promised to stop at the first sign of trouble. (Because you never heard of time-delayed tempered glass scratch growth?)
Some window cleaner weaken their waivers like that. Some do it verbally - some write this stuff into the waiver.
They’re dead meat when they screw up.
Good for you.
What did you tell them?
(And how did they take it?)
