"If you can clean a window in Austin in August, you can clean a window anywhere."
— On the working conditions of central Texas.
Jerry has been a working cleaner in central Texas since 2009. His route is built around Austin proper but extends into the hill country — Lakeway, Dripping Springs, Bee Cave, and a handful of accounts as far west as Marble Falls. About a quarter of his customers are on private wells rather than municipal supply, which has shaped his entire approach to hard-water work because well water in the Texas hill country runs significantly harder than even the worst Austin city water, and the standard protocols don't cover it.
He covers the Texas and central-plains beat for this site. The mid-August heat-load problem, which is that a south-facing pane in Austin in August can hit 130°F by noon and flash-evaporate any solution applied to it before the squeegee crosses the glass. The oak pollen calendar — late February through early April in central Texas, with cedar fever as a separate prelude in December and January. The well-water households where the right answer is a whole-house softener plus a separate distilled-rinse protocol on the windows, and the wrong answer is the standard distilled-rinse alone.
Jerry's cleaning philosophy is shaped by working in conditions where most published cleaning protocols don't quite apply. He has spent significant time calibrating the House Standard recipe to perform in heat loads above 110°F, and his variant — slightly higher surfactant load, distilled water cooled in a chest cooler, sleeve-application only — is documented in his correspondence with our senior editor and may, if he ever writes it up, become a published variation in the encyclopedia. He says he is going to write it up. He has been saying so since 2022.
He grew up in Lubbock, moved to Austin for school, and has been there since 2007. He drives a 2016 Tundra with a tool box his cousin welded together in 2018 and that he has not had reason to replace. He runs the route with one part-time helper and a route management system he maintains in a spiral notebook, on the grounds that the spiral notebook has not yet crashed.