Window Cleaning Add-Ons

Sweeps are cleaning up again: Chimney sweeps conjure thoughts of sooty-faced kids and their equally filthy mentors, smoky skies in Victorian England and more shocking still, Dick Van Dyke’s awful cockney accent in Mary Poppins. But the job is enjoying a revival as demand for the service is growing among the trendy and the cash conscious. As a manager of a big toy store which boasted, among other things, a huge play park for youngsters, Martin Tradewell had job security . . . but he was looking for an alternative. He was getting tired of the one-hour commute to work each day and there was another thing. “I hate kids,” he laughed. So he looked to work closer to home in Leyburn, North Yorkshire, starting first as a window cleaner. “A lot of people associate window cleaners with chimney sweeps and when they kept asking about doing their chimney I looked into it.” That was in 1996 and by 1997, after being trained by the Guild of Master Sweeps, he was fully qualified. His company, The Dales Sweep, as the name suggests, covers the Dales from Durham down to Yorkshire and he’s a busy man.

“When I first started up I spent nearly three years of doing both window cleaning and being a chimney sweep. Now I’m just a chimney sweep full-time. There’s a lot more work out there now. Demand has probably gone up by a third in that time.” It’s not just Martin, 46, who is benefiting. Despite the recession and job insecurity it seems that being a chimney sweep is one of the few growth industries. It’s been quite a turnaround in fortunes for the job. The 1956 Clean Air Act, which enforced the use of smokeless fuels in many areas, may have been good for the environment and the quality of life of millions, but it proved devastating to a centuries-old occupation often passed down from father to son. But today the National Association of Chimney Sweeps say their members are dealing with ever-increasing demand while there has been an influx of new trainees.

There are a number of reasons. Thanks to soaring gas prices, sales of wood-burning and multi-fuel stoves rose 40% in 2008 as homeowners attempted to cut their bills. And it’s not just an economic motive driving it. At the other end of the pay scale, the opening up of fireplaces has become a trend statement among the better off who purchase character properties and seek to restore or mimic the building’s original features. Whatever the reason the result is the same – more chimneys needing to be regularly cleaned and more business for the small, self-employed army of sweeps across the country. Now we’re in autumn, with winter fast approaching, it’s the busiest time of the year for chimney sweeps. They expect business to be particularly good as the memory of last year’s bitter winter is still fresh in the memory.

The father-son tradition is beginning to emerge again, too. As a lad Richard Lawson helped his chimney sweep father Bob, but after his dad died he eventually ended up in a completely different job, working as a sheet metal worker with the Swan Hunter shipyard in Wallsend. Then, about six years ago he decided to become a chimney sweep again and his son, also called Richard, has followed him into it, both now running their own businesses. Richard senior said: “There’s a lot of work coming from people from all walks of life. Wood-burning stoves are the most popular. More and more people are drifting back to solid fuel and reopening fires that were once closed up years ago.” Opening up fires again requires planning permission and isn’t something anybody can do. Richard is qualified to do it through Hetas, the Government-recognised body which oversees the work.

Richard, 49, of Hexham Chimney Sweeps – his 25-year-old son runs Ryton Chimney Sweeps – doesn’t use the traditional brushes, instead doing the cleaning work with the power sweeper. Meanwhile, Martin uses the brushes. “I’m a bit of a traditionalist. Even then, when I turn up at first the customer says you’re not what I expected.” Gone are the days when sweeps looked like a black-faced dancing Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, and he says he’s as clean at the end of the day as he is at the start. While the basic principle of putting a brush up a chimney is the same now, there are different vacuum cleaners to control the mess. So in more ways than one it could be said they are cleaning up. A Victorian tradition held that it was lucky for a bride to kiss a chimney sweep on her wedding day. And it seems that Lady Luck is smiling on them again today. Or, in the words of Dick Van Dyke: “Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, chim chim cher-ee! A sweep is as lucky, As lucky can be.”

The Cleaner: Brent Riddle makes tragedy disappear, one bloody sponge at a time. Brent Riddle got the call. He was only 16, a high schooler in Bothell. On the other end, he heard his friend Andrew’s mother. He’d watched Andrew recede into depression and isolation lately. Andrew didn’t have a father in his life. Now, Andrew put a gun to his head. He’s in the hospital. The house is a mess. Blood all over. Do you think you could come over and take care of it? “I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to do it,” Riddle says now, almost 20 years after the incident. “It was pretty serious. He had dragged himself from room to room [before] his sister found him.” Riddle didn’t really know what he was supposed to do. He brought over bleach and spray bottles, 3M pads, demolition gear. He wiped down the floors and walls, cut out sections of carpet and linoleum, threw away some furniture. “It was kind of a rude awakening, to see that firsthand,” he says. But, looking around the house, he was glad he’d been there. “There’s no amount of money that could put you in the position to clean up your brother, your loved one, your father,” he says. “That’s kind of, in a nutshell, how we got started.”

A few years later, Riddle and his brother launched a company called Med Tech, to do the kind of work nobody in their right mind would volunteer for. The company moved to Spokane in 2000 and — like about half a dozen similar companies in the area — responds to grisly, gross and tragic calls for help across Washington, Idaho and Montana. Like the call Riddle got from a Whitman County jail. An outgoing inmate in solitary confinement had smeared feces all over his cell as a kind of farewell present. Or the hoarding case on the West Side. A woman with some mental problems had been living there for years, he says, before she suffered a heart attack and the state intervened. There was stuff — just stuff — everywhere. It took eight trucks to carry it all away. Mice and rats ruled the place. On her bedroom floor, he found the outline of a dead dog. “You’ve never seen anything like it,” he says.

But most of the 10 to 20 calls he handles each year are suicides. He’ll get a call like the one in 1991 about his friend. (Incidentally, Andrew, whose name has been changed in this article, survived). But now, when he goes to work, he shows up with a trailer full of tools and chemicals. Usually, a family member will let him into the house. Sometimes they come in with him. Sometimes they ask him to remove things they don’t want the rest of the family to see. He says he tries not to look at family photos in suicide cases. “I don’t like to put a face to the person who’s left this world,” he says. “It doesn’t make me uncomfortable, but it makes my job harder to do.”

Still, Riddle will take extensive pictures, for insurance. Then he puts on his full get-up. Police have already gone over the scene, so he’s not concerned about evidence (although an overlooked bullet will prompt a call to the local precinct). He just sets to work, picking up the pieces (“I’ve picked up all kinds of things that I’m not going to go into detail about”), killing any lingering organisms, spraying, wiping, scrubbing. He’ll tear up carpets and sub-floors, pull up trim and bust down drywall. Then he’ll start to put it all back together again: new floors and carpet, fresh coats of paint — often in sunnier, more vibrant shades than before. Then he takes more pictures.“The ‘afters’ are amazing. ‘Did that happen here?’” he says. “The ‘before’ is something that would make somebody sick to their stomach.” Not him, though. Riddle says he tries not to bring the emotional toll of his work home with him, that he’s found a way to shut off the pain, for the most part. He credits his Christian faith with helping him to put the person’s death in perspective. “I know there’s life after death,” he says. “Or I hope there is. I like to think that those people are still around.”

It’s not always so easy, though. “That’s not saying I’ve not cried on the way home from a job. I’ve had to pull over and just, you know, cry,” he says, pausing. “The hardest jobs have been the ones where fathers have left their children and their wives behind. The sole provider of the home, things are too tough and they end up leaving this world. I see what it does firsthand because I deal with the wives and the children. I see the kids’ rooms. That’s the most difficult. “

But that, he says, is why he does what he does: to help those families move on. “I have a soft spot in my heart, so I’m able to befriend these people and not only do the job but to comfort them and give them a peace of mind,” he says. “I love people. I want to help people. If I need to sit and have coffee with somebody before a job gets done, I will. I know what it takes to recover and heal and go through the grieving process.”

In the United States ABRA is an international non-profit association of crime and trauma scene recovery professionals who are dedicated to upholding the highest technical, ethical and educational guidelines of the biohazard remediation industry. ABRA offer the members a central voice and the common bond of fighting the same industry problems and overcoming the same obstacles. ABRA keeps up on industry developments and changes, then acts as a central hub for the accumulation and distribution of industry related information.

In the UK, there is a window cleaning forum run by Chris that's called SCSF which specialises in this kind of work with related clean-up operations. I know no other forum that specialises in this field. A fairly new window cleaning forum, it carries views & opinions on todays window cleaning news, resources & information. I urge you to sign up & take a look! The forum logo is "The scsf...run by cleaners...for cleaners and new starters in the industry"

Special discounts & offers are commonplace here, they are offering a discount for the conference featured at the foot of this blog. The price has been reduced to £99+VAT and Benchmark Certification is now on board offering CPD point certificates through the forum.

BRADI (Bio recovery and Disaster International) was formed as a group of technical experts who will each head up special interests groups (SIG’s) to work towards development of standards. BRADI aim to achieve this by including all stakeholders and providing the wider industry with a route to respond and have input. Through peer review and regular update via the SIG’s these standards will remain relevant and recognised as “Industry Best Practice”. Includes:

Death  & Trauma scene

Environmental cleans

Crystal Meth lab

Cannabis lab and illicit drug factory

Sewerage and flood biological contamination

Sanitation and  odour destruction

Asbestos removal (non Licensed subject to 2006 regs)

Oil spill and general decontamination

Toxic Mould removal and prevention

Contamination or health threat investigation and clearance

Outbreak and infection control

Fire and Flood restoration  and drying                            

CBRN decontamination or support services

Ventilation and kitchen duct cleaning systems

Graffiti and stone cleaning

Insurance damage restoration building companies