Resolving Heavy Mineral Deposit Issues on Glass

We recently have run into a situation when cleaning the glass of a commercial building. After washing the glass it still looked dirty due to heavy mineral deposits on the glass that had appear to have been accumulating for years. Justifiably, our customer was not happy with the results of cleaning the glass. Fortunately, our customer recognized that the issue was not our window cleaning but rather that the glass was in need of more of an intense restore process than a general window cleaning.

We have now prepared a video outlining three separate strategies designed to overcome those mineral deposit issues.

One strategy involves using a solid commercial window cleaning solution and employ elbow grease using superfine 0000 steel wool. This method will greatly reduce the mineral deposits, but will greatly increase the labor involved which in turn impacts the price. However, the chemical is relatively inexpensive, making this the most economical one.

A second strategy involves using a much stronger chemical that will actually dissolve the mineral deposits and reduce the elbow grease but still greatly increase the time to treat the glass. This method also carries a slight risk as the chemical can react with certain glass, so each window must first be tested by cleaning a small sample spot prior to applying to entire window. This method is more expensive than the first method.

Finally, the third strategy is more of a glass restoration using a stain removing and polishing agent that will essentially result in almost new looking glass. The chemical used is expensive and the process is time consuming in that it involves application of the paste using a buffing pad. This will give the best results but will ultimately cost the most.

Another factor is that we are not sure how many years it has taken to get this buildup of mineral deposits on the glass, so cannot be certain how often this procedure would need to be performed. Ideally, regardless of which method is used, it would seem that it could be employed in stages rather than the whole building in the same year. In other words perform this effort on 1 or 2 floors per year and do another 1 or 2 floors the next year and so on. After the first treatment, we could inspect the treated glass the next year for signs of mineral deposit buildup and determine if this stage strategy will suffice to keep the buildup under control. Our preliminary thinking is that it should because it seems that what is present currently is the result of a buildup over a number of years. If this proves true it can greatly reduce the cost by spreading the cost over a number of years rather than absorbing the total cost in one year.

We are adding a video demonstrating those 3 strategies.

Water Quality Issue

Recently, we have noticed that our 7 stage filtration has begun producing vastly decreased water quality production. So far we have tried flushing the system for 15-20 minutes with DI water followed by soaking for 24 hours. That had little effect. Next, we replaced the sediment filter and both charcoal filters. Flushed out after installing for 15 minutes and again soaking 24 hours. The water quality has improved, however not to the quality level we expect. We expect water quality before going through our DI to be somewhere between 15-30 TDI but ours was running closer to 75 TDI. So. We’re now concluding we will have to change out our reverse osmosis membranes. They are only a couple years old and we are attributing thus premature replacement to not having changed the charcoal filters early enough. The gallon rating for our charcoal filtration is about 5,000. We will now attach a water meter to our system to ensure that when we approach the 5,000 gallon mark. We replace the charcoal filters. We’ll keep you posted.
Kevin

Self Contained Pure Water Set Up

From time to time, we end up on a job site that presents challenges with regard to either access to electricity or good pressure water sources. In the past, we've been able to overcome those obstacles by using lot's of extension cords and lot's of hose. But sometimes even those measures won't work.

Not too long ago we were on a commercial job site that simply had no water source. And there were none to choose from for blocks away. We decided to create a mobile pure water setup to deal with those kinds of situations.

In general what is needed is a storage tank of a couple hundred gallons, plumbed for water access, a 12 volt pump, pressure regulator. The idea is to make our own pure water at our shop and fill the storage tank, then using a 12 volt pressure regulated pump system we can perform our pure water technology on site without requiring a water hook up or power.

If you've ever had to do this, we would be interested in your set up as well!

Kevin A Scott
Pro Window Cleaning

Solution Colder Weather RO Pressure Problems

We recently had a client that had scheduled a water pole service that required execution on a specific week. It turned out that the scheduled week we encountered temperatures that are not really compatible to an 8 stage RO filter system. Generally, you want temperature in the upper 50's or greater due to the fact that at lower temperatures the RO membranes tend to constrict resulting in lowering water pressure. We knew we could rig up a water tank and pump system that would only require temperatures above freezing to operate. However, we didn't have time to get that all rigged up so we needed a quick inexpensive solution. After some research we determined that we would employ a pump booster into our existing system. We simply place the electric pump in line of our water source. This bumped our water pressure an additional 40 psi. With this boost we could now produce pure water at 70 psi with no problem at 45-55 degrees. Later we will incorporate this into a water tank pump system with pre filtered water perhaps in spring. If you've encountered similar issues here's a link to jracenstein's window cleaning supplies that has the pump we used.

http://www.jracenstein.com/

Troubleshooting RO Filter

Last fall we struggled with our water pole setup on a big job. The problem was that we were unable to get enough water pressure to use the water pole. We were using a 5 stage filtration system a fiber filter, 2 carbon filters, and finally 2 reverse osmosis filters. Since the air temperature was hovering in th 50's, we chalked this problem up to the membranes becoming restricted due to the cooler temperature. We cut back drastically on the waste valve to increase pressure managed to complete the job in "limp" mode. We thus concluded that was it for that filter until warmer weather. We now get into spring and the temperatures have climbed. We return to same job and even though the air is temping in the 70's we again experience the same pressure issue. We once again reverted to "limp" mode and complete the job. After making a phone call to our manufacturer "simpole", Phil after hearing the symptoms concluded that somehow our RO filters must be clogged. The solution would be to dismantle the whole filter system and soak the RO membrane in DI water overnight and reassemble. This makes lot's of sense and we are going to implement this shortly. Have you had any such issues with your filtration systems? By the way we had 40 pounds of pressure going in to the system, but only getting about 20 pounds out. Let us know what you've experienced.

The whole pure water technology applied in the window cleaning industry is gaining acceptance all over the world. However, at some point in time you might run into a unique problem. What problem you may ask? Well, have you ever dealt with a situation where you were awarded the contract on a job, then once starting the job find that the water pole doesn't seem to work? That happened to us last year when we began the cleaning of a hospital in Eastern Kentucky. It seemed that no matter how hard we scrubbed or how many times we did the windows, they continued to look streaky. While operating the water pole it seemed like we couldn't get the glass wet. After much frustration we learned that there are essentially two types of glass extremes we can come into contact with in the field. One is hydrophobic and the is hydrophollic. If these are new terms to you, rest assured they were new to us as well. The term hydrophobic means that the glass hates water. The term hydrophollic means that the in general the glass loves the water and get's really wet. Hydrophollic glass works beautiful with our water pole technology whereas hydropobic doesn't. The reason why? Well for pure water technology to work it requires the dirt molecules to make contact with the pure water where it now is attracted to and latches on then gets rinsed off. But if you can't get the glass wet then you can't entice the dirt molecules to grab on. The solution? You need to first apply a chemical that attracts the dirt molecules after which you can rinse off that chemical and the dirt with it. What product? We used Glass Gleam 4 and it worked great!

If you have had to overcome some challenges in either conventional window cleaning or using pure water technology let us know, we'd love to hear it.