The Water-Fed Pole Has Revolutionised Window Cleaning

Twenty years ago, there was not much difference between one window cleaner and another. They all had a ladder, a bucket, a sponge, and a cloth (which is now called a scrim but used to be called a beer cloth) and a scraper, and that was how they cleaned your windows. A lot of running up and down ladders and moving them about was involved, but window cleaners were all much the same.

In fact, many people thought that window cleaning was an easy job and that you didn't need a university degree, and in some cases you were only doing it to keep off the streets. And in some cases that may even have been true.

However, if you stop to think about it for a moment, a window cleaning business is a very good business model. This is especially true of residential window cleaning because, once you have set up a group of customers, you take a relatively small amount of money off each of those customers, and they get very upset if you don't come back next month. They want you to clean their windows and are happy to pay you the money. This means that you don't need to invest a lot of time or energy in finding new customers, and even if you lose one – because they move or for any other reason – it isn't going to make very much difference to your income.

And then along came the revolution: water-fed pole window cleaning, or WFP for short. Suddenly you didn't need a bucket and sponge, along with a scraper and a scrim, but you do need a van and a gadget that turns ordinary old tap water into pure water – i.e. water from which the minerals and impurities have been removed. Of course, most people think that the water which comes out of their tap is pure, but it isn't. It contains a whole range of minerals which can have a serious effect on a sheet of glass when you are trying to clean it, but water that has been de-ionised doesn't.

Who would think it, but old-fashioned window cleaning required a skill. Skill at moving your ladders quickly and skill at using your squeegee and cloth. A WFP window cleaning system doesn't need those skills, although to be fair it takes cleaning a window with the pole a bit of getting used to.

However, once you have got used to it the benefits are enormous. You don't need ladders, so you have immediate health and safety benefits because you are standing on the ground. Provided you have enough extensions on your pole you can suddenly clean windows five storeys off the ground, or perhaps more. That means that you can now clean commercial office buildings because you can reach windows that you could never possibly do on a ladder – even if you wanted to. If you go more for commercial building window cleaning, you don't need nearly so many customers. Window cleaning has come of age and is now being recognised more as a profession than a business that is simply keeping someone off the streets.

We haven't even got to the best bit. Using pure water means that there is no need for detergents, a squeegee, a scrim, or anything else. Pure water attracts and dissolves the dirt on the windows into itself. Provided a proper rinsing procedure using the water jets is followed, all of the (now dirty) pure water used for cleaning just falls off the glass leaving it as clean as, if not more so, than washing it by hand.

Then there are other benefits. There are now trolley systems which can either carry pure water in a container, which is great for areas that are difficult to reach such as a courtyard where you can't run a hose, or they can be attached to a tap and the water can be purified as you go. There are also backpacks which can hold up to 25 litres of water as well.

In addition to that, there are trailers which you can just unhitch from the van and they can hold up to 1200 litres of heated water. These are ideal for a large commercial contract because you can clean all day from them.

Isis Property Services uses water-fed pole window cleaning and can clean the windows of commercial buildings up to 70 feet high with them nationwide.

Isis Property Services undertakes window cleaning nationwide and is qualified to work at any sort of height with rope access and platforms.