"Streak-free is a chemistry problem."
— The phrase printed on the masthead of every issue, by her insistence.
Mara is the senior editor of Window Washing Guide and has been in the trade for twelve years, the last seven as a working route cleaner in Chicago and the previous five as an apprentice and then a junior partner at a commercial outfit in Milwaukee. She has cleaned the exterior glass on three of the ten tallest buildings in North America, written equipment reviews for Pro Window Cleaner Magazine, and personally tested every method that appears under her byline on this site.
She is the architect of what we call the House Standard — the reference solution recipe used as the default in our Solution Calculator and cited throughout the encyclopedia. The recipe is, by her design, deliberately unfussy: distilled water, three drops of Dawn, occasional ammonia only on substrates she's verified. The point is not the ratio. The point is the principle that surfactant should be the smallest amount that wets the glass, and that the working cleaner's job is to know what's actually under their squeegee.
Mara is a vinegar-and-Dawn person who has had a productive twelve-year argument with our science editor, Easton Giordano, about the role of acetic acid in residential glass care. The argument is the engine behind our most-read article, on the vinegar question, and is unlikely to ever fully resolve.
She lives in Chicago, where the water is famously, awfully hard, and where she does a small private route on Sunday mornings for clients she has had since 2017. She does not take new clients. She writes most of the foundational chemistry pieces on this site and edits all the others.