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.
A homeowner in Troy left me a one-star review last August. The complaint was that her windows looked terrible after I cleaned them. I drove back out to the house — twenty-eight minutes each way — and stood on her front porch and looked at her windows. They were spotless. The glass was perfect. Six panes per window, eight windows on the front of the house, every one of them clean enough to read a phone screen through.
But the screens — which the previous cleaner had not put back in for two years, and which I had reinstalled because that is the right thing to do — were filthy. The screens had been sitting in the garage. They were dusty, they had a faint web of cobweb across two of them, and one had a small bend in the corner from being leaned against a bicycle. The clean glass behind the dirty screens looked, from the street, like dirty glass behind dirty screens.
I cleaned the screens, on the spot, free, because that is what you do. I changed her review to four stars. But I learned something that day, which is that screens are at least half the residential window cleaning job, and most homeowners and most pros do not include them in the estimate. This piece is about how to handle them properly, whether you are doing your own house or hiring out.
A modern residential window screen is a thin aluminum or fiberglass mesh stretched over an aluminum or vinyl frame, sized to slide into a track in the lower (or, on casements, outer) sash. It exists to let air through and keep insects out. It does this job moderately well for about eight to twelve years before the mesh starts to oxidize, sag, or accumulate enough fine debris that it stops being transparent.
The trouble is that screens are between you and the glass. If you clean only the glass, the screens still affect the visual result from outside. If you do not clean the screens at the same time as the glass, you will be back. Always.
There are also four secondary problems that compound this:
They get put back wrong. Screens are nominally identical but actually slightly different — the manufacturer cuts each one to its specific opening, and screens that look interchangeable often are not. A wrong-sized screen will not seal at the bottom, which lets bugs in, which is the opposite of the entire purpose.
They get bent. A screen leaned against the side of a house, against a railing, against a hedge, will bend. A bent screen does not slide back into its track. A bent screen looks bent forever.
They get torn. This is rare on aluminum mesh and common on fiberglass. Once torn, a screen needs to be re-meshed, which is a cheap repair ($12-20 in materials) but a job that is annoying enough that most people avoid it for years.
They get lost. This sounds funny but I have, in eleven years, returned to homes where the previous cleaner literally left a screen at the previous job and forgot to come back for it. The homeowner discovered it three weeks later. Screens are heavy enough that you forget they are leaning against your truck, and pros lose them more often than you would think.
This is what I do on a residential interior-and-exterior job. It works for one window, and it works for thirty. The order is the order.
Use blue painter's tape and a Sharpie. Write the room and the window position. Master BR / left. Kitchen / center. Living / window 3 / left. Stick the tape on the inside of the screen frame, where it will not be visible when reinstalled and will not get wet during cleaning. Do this before you put the screen anywhere.
This step takes about ten seconds per screen and saves you, conservatively, fifteen minutes of stress at reinstall on a typical job. I learned this from a cleaner in Royal Oak who taught me the trade. He had a piece of tape on every screen in his truck on every job. He never put a screen back wrong.
Screens lean and bend; they do not stack and bend. Lay them flat on a clean surface — a tarp on the lawn, a clean section of garage floor, the truck bed — with the mesh side up in a stack. The mesh is fragile. The frame is sturdy. Stack them frame-to-frame and they will be fine. Lean them and they will dent.
If you are working a multi-story house, do not carry screens up and down the stairs more than once. Take them all out, set them up, do them all at the same time, and reinstall them all at the end. The temptation to do it window-by-window will cost you forty minutes per house.
A typical homeowner reaches for a hose and a stiff brush. This is wrong on two counts. The hose pressure dents the mesh. The stiff brush cuts the mesh.
What works: a soft natural-bristle brush — the kind sold for car detailing, about $8 — and a five-gallon bucket of water with a teaspoon of Dawn. Brush each screen on both sides with light pressure, working from the center outward toward the frame. Rinse with a gentle stream of water from a hose set on shower or low-pressure mist. Air-dry for about ten minutes — they dry fast, they're mostly air — and they're done.
For seasonal grime that has been baked on by sun (very common in May after the trees finish dumping pollen), the brush plus Dawn solution might need a second pass and a thirty-second dwell time between brushing and rinsing. That's the maximum. Do not bring out solvents. Do not bring out vinegar. Do not bring out Windex. The mesh does not need any of those things, and the frame's powder coating will react badly to some of them.
Match the tape on the screen to the room. Match the position. Slide the screen back in. Confirm that it sits flush on all four edges and that the bottom seal closes properly. If a screen does not seat flush, you have one of three problems: the wrong screen (re-check labels), a bent frame (remove, find a flat surface, gently reverse the bend), or a worn track (a different problem; not the screen's fault).
Take the tape off only after every screen is back in its correct window. Don't take the tape off as you go. If you do, and one is wrong, you have lost the labeling system.
Screens get filthier than glass at about a 2-to-1 ratio. If you clean your glass twice a year, you are letting your screens accumulate a year and a half of pollen, dust, and tannin between cleanings. By the third cleaning cycle they will look permanently dingy even right after a wash.
The right rhythm, for residential, is screens every cleaning — annually if you do annual, biannually if you do biannual. The marginal time cost is about twenty minutes per house. The visual difference, from the curb, is enormous.
This is the part most cleaners get wrong. I see estimates that price the glass and tack on screens as a small surcharge — five dollars per window, ten dollars total. That is too low.
The honest math is that screens add roughly 25% to the time of an interior-and-exterior residential job. If you charge $200 for a typical 1,800-square-foot home with twenty windows, screens push that toward $250. If you are not charging for them, you are eating about twenty minutes of labor per house, which on a route of three houses a day is an hour of unpaid work daily.
I learned this slowly. For my first three years on a residential route I undercharged for screens, the same way most people do. I have since corrected it. The customers who refused to pay for screen cleaning when I raised the rate were customers who were also undervaluing every other part of the job, and most of them have moved on to other cleaners. The ones who stayed are the customers I want.
If you are hiring out, ask whether screens are included before you book. If they aren't, that's not necessarily a deal-breaker — it just means you are paying for glass-only, and you should know that going in. The dirty screens you'll see afterward are not the cleaner's fault. They are the contract you signed.
Jan Davenport is a staff writer at Window Washing Guide. He has cleaned an estimated 41,000 screens in his career and has, by his own count, lost exactly two of them. Both were eventually returned.