In my market, track cleaning is an expected part of window cleaning. I have struggled with ways to effectively and efficiently clean tracks.
It’s a little more straight forward when not doing WFP on exteriors, but in our high dirt and dry area, fine grain dirt will get caught up in about every nook and cranny of slider and double hung windows. Making a muddy mess that drains down the window into the tracks.
How do you guys who do tracks do them?
I’ve got it down to this:
Remove screens, dry brush tracks, remove tracks (if horizontal sliders) and vacuum underneath, wipe down track and reinstall. I usually will vacuum the fuzzy seals on exterior side of pop out windows too. Problem here is then I will go outside and either WFP the exterior or hit em with the squeegee. Go back and do insides. Then I’ll clean screens outside and reinstall. During reinstall I’ll wipe any of the mud off that has gotten back into the tracks or sills. But I know that after I leave more slightly muddy water will run down into the sill on double hungs or tracks on sliders.
What is your preferred method to clean tracks?
I’ll note that a simple wipe down doesn’t cut it for our level of service (and pricing). Plus it doesn’t clean the dirtiest part of the tracks which are wedged between the tracks and sills.
I simply brush the dirt loose from the tracks, run my handheld vacuum to clear the now loosened dirt, wipe down - sometimes use scrub pad for stubborn neglected tracks, then clean the window as normal.
If I had to “remove tracks” to clean underneath them, there would be a substantial charge for that.
Garry’s got it. At the end when we reinstall screens we’ll give them another wipe to get any dirt that ran off the window. If there’s no screens they probably aren’t opening the window much so we forgo that step.
We have some houses like this… double hung windows with nasty inner tracks. When we first used to clean them (without dismantling the weather strips) the water from the WFP would drain through the dirty inner tracks and get all over their white stucco. The only solutions to avoid this is are:
Don’t use WFP, just flip all windows inward and clean both sides trad from the inside.
Take out the strip, vacuum and wipe out whats in there. Then proceed with WFP. (We charge extra)
Even if the top of the track looks clean… if you take it apart you will see how bad it is.
Lady today wanted me to clean the whole inner tracks of the windows like the whole left and right side and also the corners of the tracks where some dirt builds up.
“I thought this was included.”
No no, it’s not.
Busting my ass to clean the windows and this lady is only focused on the tracks…
I said I would wipedown the tracks, not clean every inch of it.
This is exactly what happened to me yesterday. Huge two story home, extra large windows, screens. $764 and she mainly wanted the tracks cleaned. What? Multiple over sized windows and screens took all day to do, and the tracks had dirt in the corners? Deep clean is an extra charge and her husband didn’t really want to pay for windows in the first place. I’ll be content with that one not coming around again.
Customers here hyper focus on sills so my quote includes windows in/out, sills and screen ‘cleaning’ which is basically using my scrubber and toweling off.
Other companies here in town itemize and I can’t tell you how many times I get an earful about how pissed they were about that.
As for getting ‘spots’ off windows, I have been using a Triumph razor on every job for 26 years, no ‘waiver’. If they have glass fines I’ll just scrub and squeegee and point out any preexisting scratches. Customers really appreciate being informed and ‘in the know’.
With the exception of hard water stains, that window is going to be as clean as I can get it, period. Artillery fungus, silicone, bug dots, nose prints, doesn’t matter. I may whip out the BioClean for really bad hard water spots.
