5-Star Rated Window Cleaner in Adelaide Leave it to the professionals

What's actually included

A residential clean covers every pane inside and out, not just the ones facing the street. We wash the glass, work it with a squeegee, then detail the edges by hand — that last step is what separates a clean window from a streaky one, and it's the step most people skip. Frames get wiped down and sills are cleaned. Flyscreens come out, get washed, and go back in.

Why glass streaks

Streaks are almost never the cleaner's fault in the sense people imagine. They come from cleaning in direct sun, so the solution dries before it can be pulled off; from a dirty or nicked squeegee blade dragging residue back across the pane; and from using paper or a rag that sheds fibres and leaves a film behind. We work with microfibre rather than paper, keep the blade clean between panes, and pick the shaded side of the house first. On exterior glass we use a water-fed pole and pure water, which carries the dirt away and dries without leaving mineral marks behind.

Old glass and heritage windows

Adelaide's inner suburbs are full of leadlight, timber-framed sash windows and original glazing that is thinner and softer than modern float glass. It scratches, and once it's scratched it stays scratched. Those windows get cleaned by hand, with no aggressive scraping, and we keep water off the timber — a soaked sill on a century-old frame swells the sash and it stops sliding.

How often is worth it

Most Adelaide homes look their best on a three to four month cycle. Homes under established street trees pick up pollen and leaf litter through spring and want it more often. Homes near a main road cop exhaust film and want it more often again. Coastal properties deal with salt. There's no universal answer, and anyone who gives you one is guessing — we'll tell you what we'd actually recommend when we see the place.

Booking and access

One-off cleans are fine — before guests arrive, before an inspection, after a storm. So is a regular cycle, which usually works out cheaper per visit because the glass never gets far gone. We keep gear off your garden beds and paths, and we work off poles from stable ground rather than dragging ladders across your property. Before we pack up, you check the work. If a pane isn't right, say so and it gets done again.

Glass is your first impression

A customer forms an opinion of your business from the footpath, before they've spoken to anyone. Smeared glass, fingerprints around the door handle, dried rain spots down the frontage — none of it registers consciously, and all of it registers. Clear glass is the cheapest presentation a business can buy. It costs less than a single day's advertising and it works every day of the month.

Scheduled around your trade, not ours

Commercial glass gets cleaned before you open or after you close. That's the whole point — nobody wants a squeegee across the window while a customer is trying to eat, and nobody wants a wet footpath at eleven in the morning. Frequency depends entirely on what you do. Cafés and food businesses generally want weekly, because the door glass takes constant hand contact. Retail sits comfortably at fortnightly or monthly. Offices and consulting rooms are usually fine quarterly.

Main-road frontages

If your frontage faces a busy road — Prospect Road, The Parade, Goodwood Road — traffic lays down a fine exhaust film that dulls glass within weeks of a clean. It's not dirt in the way rain spots are dirt; it's a haze that flattens the light coming through. The only thing that beats it is a regular cycle. Cleaning it once and waiting six months means paying to remove six months of build-up rather than a few weeks of it.

Strata and common areas

Entry glass, stairwell windows, lobby panes and the awkward high glass above a common entrance. These are the windows that get forgotten in a strata agreement because nobody individually owns them, and they're often the first thing a prospective tenant sees. We reach upper glass with water-fed poles from ground level.

Paperwork and scheduling

Invoices on request, consistent scheduling, and the same person turning up each time so you're not explaining the site from scratch every visit. If the work isn't right, it gets done again — that applies to a shopfront exactly as it applies to a house.

What gets cleaned

Glass inside and out, the door and its handle area, frames, and the sills that collect leaves and cigarette ends along a street frontage. High glass above an awning is reached with a pole rather than a ladder blocking your entrance. Signage and vinyl decals are cleaned around, not over — decals lift if you take a blade near their edge, and replacing a shopfront decal costs considerably more than the clean did. If your frontage has internal glass partitions or a display window that's handled daily, tell us; those are the panes that show fingerprints fastest and they're easy to overlook from outside.

The hardest glass to clean

Post-construction is a different job to a normal clean, and it's the one where inexperience does permanent damage. New glass arrives on site protected, then gets painted near, rendered near, silicone-sealed, stickered, and coated in a fortnight of concrete dust. By handover it's carrying a layer of material that is chemically bonded, physically stuck, or both.

Why scraping goes wrong

Everything on that glass has to come off with a blade, and a blade on glass is unforgiving. Dragged across a dry pane, it traps a grain of grit under the edge and pulls it the whole length of the window, leaving a scratch that no polish removes. Worse, some modern glass carries a surface coating — low-E, self-cleaning, toughened with a fabrication haze — and a blade takes the coating with it. The pane then has to be replaced. That's the phone call nobody on a build wants to make.

How it's done properly

The glass gets wet first, always. Soaked, so the debris floats rather than grinds. The blade is fresh, held at a low angle, and worked in one direction rather than scrubbed back and forth. Silicone and adhesive residue come off with the right solvent rather than brute force. Then the whole pane is washed, squeegeed and detailed like any other window. It is slower than a domestic clean and it should be.

Builders, renovations and handovers

New builds, extensions, and the renovation that started as a kitchen and became half the house. We work to a handover date, and we'd rather come after the last trade has left than clean a window twice. If the site is still active, tell us — glass cleaned before the renderer finishes is glass cleaned twice, at your expense.

What you get back

Glass without paint specks, without render splatter, without sticker adhesive around the edges, and without scratches. Frames and sills cleared of the site dust left behind on site. The same guarantee as everything else: check it before we leave, and if it isn't right it gets done again.

Timing it right on a build

The single biggest cost on a post-construction clean is being called too early. If the painters are still cutting in, or the renderer has a wall to finish, or the landscaper is about to run a bobcat past the windows, the glass will be dirty again within a day. Builders who book us for the week after the final trade leaves pay for one clean. Builders who book us for handover week and then discover a trade is running late pay for two. If you're unsure where the job is up to, call and describe it — we would rather move the booking than clean the same pane twice and charge you for the privilege.

Why the gear matters

It is genuinely possible to clean a window badly with good tools. It is close to impossible to clean one well with bad ones. The difference between a professional finish and a domestic one is not effort, and it certainly isn't elbow grease — it's that the right tool removes the water and the dirt in a single controlled pass, and the wrong one pushes both around until the pane dries in the pattern you left.

The squeegee

A squeegee is a rubber blade, and its edge is the entire tool. A blade with a nick in it leaves a line on every pane it touches. A blade that has gone hard with age skips instead of gliding. Blades get replaced, not sharpened, and they get wiped between panes so grit picked up from one window doesn't get dragged across the next. The angle matters more than the pressure — pushing harder is what beginners do, and it is what leaves streaks.

Microfibre, not paper

Paper towel sheds. Newspaper is a myth that survives because it was true when ink was different. Cotton rags leave lint. Microfibre lifts residue rather than smearing it, and it gets laundered, not reused dirty. Edges and corners are detailed with it by hand once the squeegee has done the body of the pane, because a squeegee cannot get into a corner and pretending otherwise is how you end up with clean glass framed by a dirty border.

Water-fed poles and pure water

Tap water carries dissolved minerals. Let it dry on glass and the water evaporates while the minerals stay behind as spots. Purified water has had those minerals stripped out, so it dries clear with nothing left on the pane. Fed through a pole with a brush head, it reaches upper-storey windows from stable ground — which is safer than a ladder on a sloping block, and kinder to the garden bed the ladder would otherwise be standing in.

Scrapers, and when not to use one

A scraper removes what nothing else will: paint, render, silicone, adhesive. Used on wet glass at a low angle, it's precise and safe. Used dry, on coated glass, or dragged back and forth, it scratches permanently. Knowing when to reach for it — and when not to — is the part that takes years rather than minutes, and it's the difference between a clean window and a replaced one.

The unglamorous half

Buckets, applicators, a belt so the tools are on the hip rather than balanced on a sill, and cloths that get washed rather than rinsed. None of it photographs well and all of it shows in the finish. Quality makes the difference.