How to Clean Windows Like a Pro (Plus Vancouver Window Cleaning Costs)

The instinct when glass dries badly is to blame the product. It is almost never the product. Streaking has three causes, and once you can tell them apart you will stop buying sprays and start changing what your hands are doing.

The first cause is too much soap. Detergent has to end up somewhere, and if you have used a capful instead of a few drops, most of it stays on the glass as a thin film that dries into a haze. The second is a wet or dirty squeegee blade. Every pass loads the rubber with dirty water, and if you put that blade back on clean glass you are painting the dirt back on in a stripe. The third is sunlight. Warm glass flash-dries the solution before you can pull it off, and what you are left with is dried soap in the exact pattern you applied it.

Now the part that no national guide will tell a Vancouver reader. Most window cleaning advice online is written for hard-water regions, where dissolved calcium and magnesium in the tap water dry into visible white spotting, and the recommended fix is distilled water or an acidic cleaner. That premise does not hold here. In 2024 the Greater Vancouver Water District's water quality report recorded treated water hardness averaging 22.4 mg/L as calcium carbonate in the Capilano system, 22.3 mg/L in the Seymour system, and 2.5 mg/L in the Coquitlam system. Water is generally called soft below roughly 60 mg/L and hard above about 120. Ours sits far under the soft end of that scale.

The practical consequence is liberating. Your tap water is already most of the way to what a professional purification system produces, which means no distilled water, no acid, and no branded blue spray. What you need is less soap and better technique, and that is learnable in an afternoon.

One clarification, because it sounds contradictory. Genuine hard-water etching does show up on glass here. It just does not come from the tap. It comes from irrigation overspray hitting the same pane twice a day all summer, and from mineral-rich runoff washing off concrete, stucco and masonry above a window. That deposit bonds to the glass and needs a different approach, which we cover in our hard water stain removal guide.

A working window cleaner carries four things: a bucket of cool water with a few drops of dish soap, a T-bar with a washing sleeve, a squeegee with a fresh rubber blade, and lint-free cloths. That is the whole glass-washing system. There is no proprietary formula, and anyone selling you one is selling you the least important variable in the job.

The soap is worth explaining because almost everyone misunderstands its role. It is not the cleaning agent. It is a lubricant. A dry blade on dry glass judders and skips; a trace of surfactant lets the rubber glide in one smooth pass and lifts light body oil and road film along the way. Once you understand it as lubrication rather than detergency, the correct dose becomes obvious, and the correct dose is a few drops, not a squeeze.

The blade decides your result. Squeegee rubber is consumable. It picks up nicks from window frames and grit, and a single nick leaves a hairline of water on every pass afterwards. Professionals flip or replace rubber constantly. If you have owned the same squeegee for three years and never changed the blade, that is your streak, and a replacement blade costs a few dollars.

For anything above the ground floor, the trade uses a different approach entirely: pure water fed through a telescopic pole. Tap water is pushed through sediment and carbon filtration, a reverse osmosis membrane, and a deionisation stage until a meter reads zero dissolved solids, then applied through a brush head on a carbon fibre pole. Because the water carries nothing, the glass dries spot-free with no squeegee and no ladder. There is a quiet local advantage too. Our inlet water carries so little dissolved solid that deionisation resin lasts far longer here than in a hard-water city. That is part of why pure-water work stays practical at residential prices.

Two adjacent jobs use a different kit. Mirrors, shower glass and small interior panes come up faster with a cloth and a buff than with a squeegee, which we walk through in our guide to cleaning glass and mirrors streak-free. And if you are tempted to mix something stronger than dish soap, read homemade cleaning solutions that actually work first, because several of the popular recipes quietly damage the surfaces around the glass.

Since minerals are largely off the table here, what is actually dirtying Vancouver windows? Rain, mostly, and what the rain carries. Vancouver International Airport averages roughly 1,189 mm of precipitation a year under Environment and Climate Change Canada's 1991 to 2020 climate normals, spread across more than 160 days. Rain itself is close to distilled, but it arrives having picked up road film, brake dust and airborne grit, and it deposits that load on the glass as it sheets down and dries.

Then there is the vegetation. Conifer pollen in late spring leaves a fine yellow film that bonds surprisingly well, and cedar and fir drop sap and needle debris onto sills and tracks. Shaded lots are the harder case, and there are a great many of them in North Vancouver, Deep Cove and the older tree-covered streets of the North Shore. On those, algae and moss establish on the north and east faces of the frames and creep onto the edge of the glass. That is an organic soil, not a mineral one, which is why a soapy sleeve and a blade handle it and a fancy spray does not.

The seasonal detail is the one most people miss. At Vancouver's latitude the sun climbs to only about 17 degrees above the horizon at noon in late December. That low, raking angle strikes glass almost side-on and lights up every film, smear and drip that was invisible under a high July sun. Windows do not get dirtier in winter so much as winter starts telling the truth about them. It is also why September is the right month to do this if you are hiring it out: you get the last reliably dry stretch, and you get ahead of the light that will expose whatever you missed. The summer restriction period runs into mid-October, so a do-it-yourself exterior wash means checking the current stage first, or waiting until it lifts.

There is one more local factor, and it is a regulatory one. Metro Vancouver's drinking water conservation plan limits washing impermeable surfaces through the summer, and it counts exterior glass as one. It then exempts aesthetic cleaning done by a commercial cleaning operation, and it names window cleaning inside that exemption. Read plainly: the rules are written so that hired window cleaners keep working through the season under the stages where the exemption applies. The active stage moves through the summer, so check the current restrictions before you plan an exterior wash yourself.

WorkSafeBC's fall protection regulation requires a fall protection system wherever a worker could fall 3 metres or more, or from a lesser height where the fall carries a greater risk of injury. That is an obligation on employers, not on homeowners, so nobody is breaking a rule by carrying a ladder into their own garden. But it is the standard our crews work to, and it is a reasonable line for anyone to borrow. Three metres is roughly where a second-storey window sits. Above that height, a professional is required by law to be tied off or working from the ground, which tells you something about the risk you would be accepting with a ladder and a bucket in one hand.

The practical alternative is the water-fed pole, and it is the reason most modern residential exterior work happens with both feet on the lawn. Our pole systems reach up to four storeys from the ground, which covers the overwhelming majority of detached homes and low-rise buildings in the region without a ladder ever coming off the van.

Condo and apartment residents have a simpler answer than they expect. In most mid-rise and high-rise buildings in Downtown Vancouver and Yaletown, the exterior faces are cleaned on a building-wide schedule arranged by the strata, using swing stages or bosun's chairs and specialist high-rise crews. That is not a service a resident books individually, and it is not something to attempt from a balcony or a window opening. Your side of the job is the interior glass, the tracks and the frames, plus whatever is reachable while standing flat on the balcony floor. Do not extend that reach with a pole: leaning one over a rail carries your weight toward the edge, which is precisely the risk the building's own contract exists to remove.

On a house, where you are working from ground level rather than a raised floor, the DIY equivalent of the trade's water-fed pole is a telescopic pole with a combination washer-and-squeegee head, worked from the lawn after you have looked up and confirmed there is no service drop or overhead line anywhere the pole can reach. You cannot wipe the blade between passes at that reach, so the finish will not match hand work, but long, slow, well-overlapped vertical strokes and a little residue at the edges beat standing on a ladder with a bucket in one hand.

If you do work a ladder on a ground-to-second-storey window, the non-negotiables are boring and they are not optional. Level footing, on soil the rain has not softened. A second person at the base. Three points of contact at all times. Both hands free, which means the bucket hangs off the ladder rather than travelling up in your grip. If any one of those is not true on the day, that window can wait.

Most residential window cleaning jobs in Metro Vancouver land between $150 and $400. That is our published range and it holds for the large majority of homes we quote, from a compact East Vancouver bungalow at the low end to a four-bedroom detached home with a lot of glass at the upper end.

What moves the number is rarely what people assume. It is not primarily the square footage of glass. It is access, pane count and condition. Twenty small divided-light panes take considerably longer than four large picture windows covering the same area, because every pane has its own perimeter to detail. Anything above the ground floor brings out different equipment. And glass that has not been touched in three years needs a scrape-and-prep pass before a squeegee is any use at all.

Interior and exterior are usually quoted together, because one visit costs meaningfully less than two and you cannot judge a finish until both sides are done. The soil divides along predictable lines here: exteriors carry the rain-borne grit, interiors carry the fingerprints.

Worth checking against any quote you get: ours includes screens removed, washed and reinstalled, plus the tracks and frames. Tracks matter more than they sound. A track packed with damp organic debris is where window mould gets its foothold, and it is the part a glass-only price leaves behind.

As for whether to hire it out at all, the honest test is not cost, it is scope and height. A ground-floor bungalow with eight windows is a pleasant Saturday morning and a starter kit you will keep using for years. A three-storey house with thirty panes is a full day, a ladder you probably do not own, and a real fall risk. Somewhere between those two the maths turns over, and it turns over on height long before it turns over on time.

Twice a year is the baseline for most homes here, whether you do it yourself or hand it over: early spring, once the winter grime and the last of the storms have finished, and early autumn, after pollen season and before the rain sets in properly. Exposure moves that number more than house size does. A home on a busy arterial collects road film fast, a property under heavy tree cover holds damp long enough for algae to establish, and a waterfront or exposed-ridge property takes salt spray and wind-driven grit. Any of those pushes you toward three or four visits.

Between professional visits, the highest-value maintenance is not the glass at all. It is the tracks and the sills. Vacuum the tracks, wipe the sills dry, and you remove the damp organic layer that mould needs, which protects both the window and the air in the room. That habit slots neatly into our Vancouver spring cleaning checklist.

One last thing, because it comes up on nearly every quote. Rain shortly after a clean does not undo the work. Clean glass sheets water evenly and dries clear; it is dirty glass that turns rain into visible spotting, because the drops have something to bond to and leave behind. The windows you remember as spotted after a shower were dirty before it started.

Sometimes the glass is one line on a much longer list. A deep clean covers the accessible interior glass along with everything routine cleaning never reaches, and for apartments and towers our condo cleaning service is scoped to the interior glass, tracks and balcony doors that residents are responsible for. Either way the standard is the one you can now check for yourself: step to the side, let the light rake across the pane, and see what it tells you.