Seasonal pieces, product tests, contrarian takes, and the hacks we keep seeing on the internet that we keep having to unwind. Lighter than the encyclopedia. Still the same chemistry.
Vitro Architectural Glass moves a four-year Central Plains commercial account manager up to run the Western desk. A small piece of trade news that quietly matters.
Two presumptive hantavirus cases were reported this week, on the heels of a cruise-ship outbreak this spring. The cleaning trade keeps being the invisible variable in the public-health story. We have a problem with that.
May is Asthma Awareness Month, and CMM's coverage this week loops back to a problem we already write a lot about: pollen, mold, and the role of exterior glass in carrying allergens indoors. Here's the through-line, and the tools we built around it.
Every spring my phone lights up with people who want sparkling windows for Mother's Day. Every spring I tell most of them to wait. Here's why — and what to do if you can't.
Five bottles, four panes, one chemistry-forward editor with a [pH](/glossary#ph) meter and a grudge. The results were not what the marketing copy suggests.
Every spring, the same hack resurfaces — spray Rain-X on your house windows and never wash them again. Every spring, I get a message from a homeowner asking me how to undo it. The chemistry is not on your side.
Every YouTube tutorial teaches the [fan stroke](/glossary#fan-stroke) on the first day. That is the wrong day to learn it. Here is when to actually reach for it, and what to do until you can.
ISSA's new Department of Labor-approved Cleaning Technician Registered Apprenticeship is the first national framework that treats cleaning as a skilled trade. Window cleaning sits inside that umbrella — uncomfortably, and usefully. Here's our read.
A new printed-and-tempered decorative line from a Chicago studio: watercolor-derived art, scaled large, on glass intended for partitions and feature walls. Another piece of stock the trade will be asked to clean without knowing what's on the surface.
I drove down from Phoenix on a Tuesday to ride along with the only window cleaner in a 4,800-person town. What he taught me about the trade had nothing to do with technique.
Half the call-backs I get on residential jobs are about screens, not glass. The screens are filthy, the screens have a dent, the screens are leaning against the siding because somebody forgot how they came out. Here's the simple system.
Vitro launched a protective full-surface topcoat on its Solarban 90 low-e glass that stays on the lite through tempering and reportedly cuts cycle times. The pipe between this and what a route-cleaning operator sees on a finished facade is short.