My modern house has 32 windows. More than half of them are large floor-to-ceiling windows.
Cleaning the windows is a chore in and of itself. However, adding to the headache was the silicone and stucco that my lovely builder smeared and splattered all over the windows.
I had asked my builder to at least clean the second-floor windows, but the workers made a token effort and did a half-assed job. As I've said before in this post and this post, "If you want something done right, do it yourself." So I set out to do this myself.
The silicone was very difficult to remove. I've spent parts of the past six months working at it, and I'm almost done.
Finding the right technique and tools to do the job took a bit of trial and error -- particularly for the second-floor windows. I tried Goo Gone, Xylol, Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, a window scraper, and steel wool. I found that the steel wool was the most effective, while the Goo Gone was moderately effective at dissolving some of the silicone and rather effective at removing the stucco. The Magic Erasers were quite effective, but took a lot of "elbow grease" on the first-floor windows and could not be easily attached to anything to reach the second-floor windows. The window scraper was surprisingly not all that effective at removing the silicone.
The "Mr. Longarm" 23' extension pole was critical to reaching the second-floor windows. (The name just made me think of "long-arm jurisdiction" from Civ Pro, but I digress...) This is a great product. It's very sturdy for such a long pole, easy to adjust, and relatively lightweight. I highly recommend it.
But what would I attach to it to actually clean the windows? I browsed several websites that sell professional cleaning products, but I didn't see anything that I fancied. So I created my own implement.
For spot cleaning, I wrapped a sheet of steel wool around the pole scraper and secured it with a small bungee cord:
This proved to be quite effective, but still required a lot of work. I scrubbed each area smeared with silicone hundreds of times to get the crap off. Since the gyms were closed due to the COVID-19 shutdown, I treated this as an upper body workout. After my arms grew tired, I resorted to letting my legs do the work by pushing my body and the pole up and down, so I got a full-body workout.
(By the way, the Post-It notes shown in the first picture above were to identify the areas that needed attention. Since it was not always easy to see these areas from outside at ground level, I identified and marked them from inside the house. I recommend Post-It notes, since they don't leave adhesive residue on the windows.)
For general cleaning and scrubbing, I used a pole sander.
Here's where the binder clips come in. The pole sanders on the market all use clips that are secured by wingnuts. This works well for the intended function of attaching sand paper, but when I was constantly switching between different cleaning media (terry towel for applying Goo Gone, steel wool for scrubbing, and microfiber towel for window cleaner, plus swapping in fresh towels when the old ones got dirty), having to constantly unfasten and fasten the wingnuts and clips became a hassle.
So I secured four medium binder clips to the pole sander with screws and hex nuts. This allowed me to quickly switch between cleaning media. It also allowed me to attach the steel wool using the original clips, and then quickly attach the microfiber towel over the steel wool after I was done scrubbing and ready to move on to the glass cleaner:
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