Finding a Better Way: How I Discovered Water-Fed Pole Cleaning

Last time I told you how I got started in this trade, and how it very nearly ended before it properly began. I broke my ankle when a ladder slipped, less than six months into cleaning windows for a living. A few years later, I broke both wrists in a second fall. I promised I’d tell you what happened next, so here it is.

The first time I ever saw water-fed pole cleaning, I wasn’t even looking for it. I was partway through a job, squeegee and bucket in hand, when another window cleaner pulled up on the opposite side of the street. He unravelled a hose from his van, worked his way along the windows, and drove off leaving them wet. That stopped me in my tracks. Every window cleaner I’d ever met left the glass dry, that was just how it was done. I went over and asked him what on earth he was using and how it worked. It genuinely opened my mind to a different way of doing the job.

When I looked into it properly, though, I was put off straight away. The only systems I could find at the time were aimed at established businesses with money behind them, and they were expensive. So for a while it sat in the back of my mind as an interesting idea rather than something I could actually do anything about.

Then came the second accident. Both wrists broken, six weeks in plaster, out of work and out of income for at least eight weeks on top of that. That kind of enforced stop gives you a lot of time to think, and what I thought about mostly was whether my own safety was worth what I was doing for a living. I had a young trade, a young business, and I’d already come close to losing both twice.

That’s when I started looking harder for a way in that I could actually afford. I found it eventually, a far more basic setup than the professional kit I’d been put off by. A 150 gallon-per-day, three stage filter system, a standard garden hose adapted to feed it, an aluminium pole with a brush on the end, a pump with a basic controller, and a 500 litre tank that wasn’t even fitted into anything yet. I also had to buy a van, because a car was never going to carry that much water safely.

What nobody tells you about a basic system like that is how long everything takes. That little filter only produced purified water at somewhere between ten and twenty litres an hour, which meant the van had to sit connected to a tap overnight just to have enough water for the next day’s work. I didn’t even have my own permanent water source at the time, I was in shared accommodation, so I spent a fair bit of that period begging, borrowing and occasionally just about talking my way into using friends’ and family’s outside taps overnight. There was no manual and nobody to train me. Everything, right down to maintaining the equipment and fixing it when it went wrong, was trial and error.

Getting out on the actual jobs brought its own lessons. Customers who’d only ever known dry, squeegee-cleaned windows were understandably sceptical of a bloke telling them not to worry, the windows will dry themselves. One of the early problems I hadn’t expected was that a first clean with pure water often doesn’t look perfect straight away. Years of trapped dirt in the window seals leaches out and can leave streaks, and any leftover soap film from the old traditional method reacts once it gets properly wet. I didn’t understand that at first, and neither did my customers. Luckily I’d built up good relationships with most of them over the years, so while it wasn’t a comfortable few weeks, most were patient enough to let me reclean until it was right. I learned to explain the process clearly to new customers before I even started, and that early lesson eventually turned into a fact sheet I still give out today. Water-fed pole cleaning is far more familiar to people now than it was then, but I still make sure nobody’s caught off guard by it.

What stuck with me most from that period was watching the sceptics come round. Some of the older customers who were most doubtful about the whole thing at the start would, after a couple of cleans, comment on how much cleaner their windows looked than they ever had before. That was worth more to me than anything a salesman could have told me.

If I’m honest, if I could go back and tell myself one thing from that time, it would be to spend the extra money and get better equipment sooner rather than scraping by on the basics for so long.

Water-fed pole cleaning didn’t become my main way of working straight away though. That happened later, when I relocated from Bournemouth up to Scunthorpe to be closer to family. That move meant starting completely from scratch, a new area, a new customer base, no reputation to lean on. I was one of the first people cleaning windows this way in the local area at the time, which cut both ways. It helped me stand out, but it also meant explaining and building trust from nothing with people who’d genuinely never seen it done before. I stuck to the same honesty that had got me through those early teething problems, telling new customers upfront that some recleaning might be needed while we found our rhythm together, and that I’d keep going back until they were happy.

That honesty is still baked into how I work now. If I’m honest, the complaint I still hear most often even today is about upstairs sills not being properly cleaned, and there’s a simple reason for that: unless I’m up a ladder, which rather defeats the point, I can’t always see exactly how clean a sill is, and water has a habit of sitting on them rather than running off. It’s one of the reasons the No Worries Guarantee exists in the form it does. A free reclean first, and if you’re still not happy after that, your money back. No arguments.

So that’s how I went from a squeegee and a bucket to a pole and a pump, the slow way, with a fair few soaked jumpers and streaky first cleans along the way. What I haven’t told you yet is how the two methods actually compare once you strip away the novelty, and whether traditional cleaning still has a place. That’s exactly what I’ll get into next time.