Window Cleaning News

Seth Glick, Chief Friendliness Officer with Clear Skies Residential Cleaning Inc., stands in front of his company vehicle on Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2011. Clear Skies Residential Cleaning is a trusted professional window and gutter cleaning company in Edmonton.

Business Spotlight: Clear Skies Residential Cleaning - Edmonton — It takes a lot of moxie to say you’re the friendliest anything, but it’s something Seth Glick does with full conviction. “I would say we’re the friendliest window cleaners in Edmonton, one hundred per cent,” said Glick.  “Maybe there are some people that are friendly, but we are Edmonton’s friendliest window cleaners.” Glick makes his living as Chief Friendliness Officer of Clear Skies Residential Cleaning – a home-based company in west Edmonton.

Background: Glick said he first got into window and gutter cleaning as a summer job while taking the Bachelor of Management course at Grant MacEwan University. Upon graduation and in need of some real-world experience, Glick set out to find something he wasn’t getting from his textbooks. “I was looking for a company to start where I could take all the things that I learnt and try them,” said Glick. So with minimal start-up costs and the opportunity to expand, Clear Skies was born in 2008. “I love living here so I wanted to do something where I could meet pretty much as many people as possible and build that relationship.”

Business: Over the past three years, Clear Skies has managed to build a solid clientele, and according to Glick, business has been going great.  He credits the companies’ three-tier friendliness policy, which includes house friendly, pet friendly and family friendly, for much of their success. “I’ve been working a lot on making everything very rememberable and remarkable,” said Glick. Having a mini-squeegee on hand for curious children, dog treats in the van for rowdy pups and padding on ladders for extra protection are just a few examples of the things Clear Skies is doing to create a great experience. “We’re not going to come in and start swearing on the telephone or smoking a cigarette or spitting on the floor, just little things that people have had happen in the past, and we try to prevent that,” said Glick. “It’s really just about owning the service.” Beyond the experience, Glick said that having your windows cleaned is one of the most rewarding things someone can do for their home.  He compared it to walking around with dirty glasses. “Once they’re clean, you see the world in a whole different light.”

The Future: With two full-time employees (including himself) and one part-time helper, Glick said the business is almost at the point where it will have to expand. “I plan on getting another van, another crew, take a step back from day-to-day cleaning and work on the business itself,” said Glick. After that, Glick said there’s really no telling what his future is, but whatever happens, he will definitely be living in Edmonton.

West Lindsey Council is cleaning up surfaces in the town centre. It is planning to wash and remove stains from the York stone and other surfaces using high pressure washing equipment. The work will take place between 6am and 8am over several mornings in the coming weeks and should be completed by the time most businesses open. A local window cleaner has been employed to clean any windows that are affected by the work.

Police warn residents about window cleaning scam in Harrow: Police are warning residents to beware a door-to-door window cleaning scam in Harrow. Members of the public are being warned by Harrow Police to not hand over money to anyone knocking on their door claiming to be a window cleaner collecting money, unless they know it to be genuine. There have been reports of this type of scam taking place in Repton Road and Elm Park Road in Harrow. Police are also appealing to members of the public to come forward if they have been approached by anyone doing this. Contact DC Jenny Houchin of Harrow CID on 020 8733 3482 or email us at Harrow@met.police.uk A 22-year-old man was arrested yesterday on suspicion of fraud in connection with the window cleaning scam.

Records confirm: July 2011 was one of the hottest ever: Todd Bassler, a manager at Cereal City Window Cleaning, works outside about 80 or 90 percent of the time. "I've been doing it 31 years," Bassler said. "It's been one of the hottest (summers) in a lot of years."Mostly, the only heat-related problem Bassler's crew has is that the water on the windows dries too quickly. In these situations, one person puts water on the windows while another quickly squeegees the liquid off instead of one person wetting the window and then squeegeeing the window. Sometimes, however, the heat poses a safety risk. "We went home quite a few days because it got too hot," Bassler said. "It just got downright hot-hot. I usually do it at about 95 (degrees) with the heat index and all that."

Oklahoma family in trouble turns to homeless shelter: James Pigg has filled many roles, loving husband, proud father, Army veteran, college graduate and a successful business owner. Joyce Pigg reads a book with her daughter while living at the City Rescue Mission on Monday, July 18, 2011, in Oklahoma City, Okla. Pigg and her husband James along with their five children have been living at the center for ten months after losing their home. But, Pigg, 49, never imagined he and his family would be homeless. “What happened to us, we never seen it coming,” he said. First, the family's car was repossessed. Then, they couldn't afford to stay in the house they had been renting. “We had nowhere else to go,” Joyce Pigg, his wife of 19 years, said. For the past 10 months they and their five children have lived at the City Rescue Mission's shelter. “This place kept us together,” he said. “God sent us here.”

For the Pigg family, life wasn't always so hard. James Pigg spent four years in the U.S. Army. He left the military and enrolled at the University of Oklahoma in 1985, graduating four years later with a bachelor's degree in business. After college, he owned a roofing company and a window washing company. In 2007, his wife developed ovarian cancer after giving birth to her fourth child. The cancer was removed but came back a year later and spread to her kidneys and liver. It is now in remission. She did not have medical insurance, so she accumulated debt. According to an American Journal of Medicine study, medical problems contributed to 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007. James Pigg had a hard time coping with his wife's cancer. “It broke me down mentally,” he said.

Talk of the Town: Window cleaner wings it for Bruno - It was an ill-starred bid for freedom that left its owners in a bit of a flap. An on-the-run pet cockatiel has been caught and rescued thanks to the generous spirit of a courageous window-cleaner. Judy Thomson, 31, thought her feathered friend Bruno was gone forever when he escaped from his cage last Wednesday and disappeared up a 30ft tree. But her heartache was averted by the heroics of Dazzle Window Cleaners in Currie, which sent up a worker to retrieve the bird. After an hour perched precariously on the limb of the tree, the window cleaner enticed Bruno down.

BASE Jump Chute Failure, Miracle Save! from Rock & Ice on Vimeo.

Lucky Chance, a window cleaner & base jumper who cheated death in parachute mishap: An Australian thrill-seeker got a close glimpse at why they call it the 'Death Swing' as a BASE jumping stunt gone awry nearly cost him his life. The daredevil Down Under, who calls himself Lucky Chance, was filming his 100th jump atop Australia’s Blue Mountains. The 26-year-old window cleaner from Sydney has been BASE jumping for the last four years. The 'Death Swing,' situated at a top-secret location, propels a jumper on a 30-meter rope attached to a peak. Jumpers use a harness to stay connected to the rope, and Mr Chance is the first jumper to actually let go.

A spokesman for NSW Blue Mountains National Park said the use of the 'Death Swing' is ‘not an approved activity within the park at all.' Mr Chance, 26, didn’t seem to care about the danger as he launched into the air, executing a triple back-flip with a 'one-tuck double lay out.' The jump turned ugly as his foot got snagged in the parachute and it failed to deploy, causing him to 'spiral and tumble into the ground.' But just before he hit the ground, the chute miraculously emerged and Mr Chance was able to land safely.

He said an explanation as to how he managed to perform the death-defying stunt without a scratch on him is beyond him. Mr Chance said: 'Somehow, I don’t know how it came out of the bag, and I don’t know how I managed to survive.' Unfettered by his near-fatal dive, Mr Chance said the best is yet to come. He said: 'I want to keep pushing the limits… I want to do a quadruple backflip next time.'

Tributes have been paid to a former Chorley FC and Bamber Bridge player who died in his sleep. Lee Pryers was found dead at home by his father, John, at his flat on Smethurst Road, Bolton, on July 26. The 31-year-old played over 100 games during two spells at Bamber Bridge and spent a season at Victory Park with Chorley FC. The full back’s career, which began as a trainee at Bolton Wanderers, also included a two-year stint at Fleetwood Town, where he worked under Tony Greenwood, who took him back to Irongate in 2009. A minute’s silence was observed before last week’s pre-season friendly game between Bamber Bridge and Chorley at Irongate.

Johnny said: “Lee was round here last week, and we were in the kitchen singing along to the Small Faces. He seemed happy as Larry. He was doing his window cleaning, which he loved, and he was helping a few local teams with their training. “He was doing some youth work, too. On Tuesday morning he didn’t come down to collect his clothes and we thought something was wrong. “We got into the flat using the spare key, and my dad just found him there, passed away.” An inquest has been opened at Bolton Coroners Office.

The value of being silly - Dave Silverbrand: A squeegee and a bucket of water balloons -- those were the tools of my trade that day. Oh yeah, and the Spiderman costume. In Eureka's Old Town, I was playing the role of a window washer afraid of heights. No one even asked why I was throwing the balloons to break against the second-floor windows, and then wiping them dry. I had developed my business plan as a news feature with the help of co-worker Rick St. Charles. We had even constructed a fictional Spiderman website. Get it? Not surprisingly, I got no response, not even an interrogation from a passing patrolman. Certainly not a commendation from my TV employer. He had often said my work was too silly for the evening news. Funny that I'm still here and he is not. As a businessman, I had miserably failed. As a tough-as-nails reporter, I have failed again. As a clown, maybe not.

PFI – fat cats 1, public sector 0. The UK government’s Office for Budget Responsibility, in its recent “Fiscal Sustainability Report”, has finally published details of the total liabilities under the PFI (Private Finance Initiative). They come to a fairly astonishing £40 billion. There was also an announcement about the result of a pilot project to look at how money could be saved from existing PFI schemes. An impressive sounding £1.5 billion was suggested as the potential benefit.  But hang on a minute. That’s over the whole life of the current schemes, many of which are up to 30 years. And if we apply it to the liability, that would suggest a saving of less than 4%.

And how would it be achieved? The Treasury said savings have been made through a combination of changes, including reducing wasteful energy consumption, subletting or mothballing surplus building space, and reviewing service requirements such as window cleaning and frequency of decoration. So arguably a saving of 4% is disappointing, given that we seem to be talking cheifly about demand management, changes in specification and requirements (which may well impact on customer service or at least ‘happiness’ levels – less decoration etc.)

Any real “commercial” savings seem to be noticeable by their absence.  There is no mention of price reductions or margin being given up by the providers in the pilot as far as I can see. That is true of both the service providers or the financiers – there seems to be little hope of getting anything back from the financial institutions who have made a fortune out of PFI. So the announcement was notably free of the rhetoric we sometimes hear – from whichever political party are in opposition at the time – about the “rip-offs” of PFI.

Pedestrians pass the scene where glass fell from the 27th floor of the Festival Tower Condominiums at the Bell Lightbox (aka TIFF Bell Lightbox) in Toronto, Tuesday, August 3, 2011. This is the second time in two days glass has fallen from a condo building in Toronto.