SArah,
The self cleaning glass isn't all it's cracked up to be, I think it is probably aimed at high rise buildings where access is nigh on impossible.
Although from other threads on the other forums, this glass isn't nice to clean if we come across it.
Apparently if you do it with the WFP or trad it leaves some kind of 'bloom' behind
which fades after a little while.
But the windows do still get dirty, I believe it is some kind of chemical/sunlight reaction that, linked with rain (or a hosepipe
) breaks up poo/muck/dust and it just gets washed off the glass.
Not sure if the disolved solids in ordinary tap water get left behind should you hose it down though.
So maybe the WFP'ers could dispense with using the brush on this type of glass and just rinse instead
Veering slightly.....
I do a car showroom, outside WFP, inside trad (of course
) all works tickity-boo, but where the guys on the forecourt are washing the cars, they are using a hose jet to rinse them off, this also means that when the cars are close to the showroom windows, the clean glass gets sprayed with water.
This does make cleaning a few panes a bit more like hard work, and sometimes I have to go back out and give the offending couple of panes a hard scrub with my applicator and then squeegy it off.
Now that several months have passed since they had their new showroom done, some of the windows are getting a mineral deposit build up, you can't really see it, but it's there, and you can tell it is with the feel of the brush when using the WFP, plus the way in which the water beads up in those areas.
I have tried to tell them (as politely as possible) that they should getthe guys washing the cars to just let the water flow over the car bodywork to rinse off the suds, because the water and suds splash all over the neice clean windows they are paying me£xxxx a fortnight to clean.....
Falls on deaf ears of course, but I keep reminding them, eventually they'll actually notice that there expensive plate glass windows no longer look very expensive!
They'll blame me for not cleaning them properly, and then I can point out that I've been warning them about it since the showroom was built!
I got a liquid similar to what Tomo mentions for the car winscreen once, bloody nightmare! It's silicone based, it doesn't work and actually cleaning the windows afterwards is horrible!!
I have a customer who owns a video shop, he is always smoking in there, so the inside of the glass looks awful.
He got something similar to what Tomo is on about, I warned him not to use it...
He did anyway of course
But as he didn't clean the inside properly he has actually sealed in the horible smeary finish he left behind!!
I refuse to clean the inside because he won't pay enough!
Regards
Ian