The water-fed pole is the best thing to happen to this trade since the rubber blade, and I own four of them – two carbon, two hybrid, a 650-litre tank in the Transit and a reverse osmosis unit that costs me more in membranes each year than my phone contract. So read what follows as a complaint from inside the tent. On a 1970s semi in Bexleyheath with uPVC casements, the pole wins on every measure that matters. On a four-storey stock brick terrace in Barnsbury with original box sashes, hundred-year-old linseed putty and a basement lightwell full of ferns, it loses more often than the industry likes to admit.
What Happens When Pure Water Meets 130-Year-Old Putty?
Pure water works because it is hungry. Strip out the calcium, magnesium and dissolved solids from Thames Water’s supply – which in most of north and west London runs somewhere around 300 to 380 ppm off the chalk boreholes – and you get a solvent that pulls contaminants off the glass and holds them in suspension until they run off the cill. Nothing left behind, nothing to dry into spots. On a sealed modern unit with a clean aluminium or plastic frame, that is close to magic.
Victorian putty is not a clean frame. It is whiting and linseed oil, laid in about 1888 and painted over maybe fourteen times since, by now partly perished into a chalky crumb sitting in the rebate around every pane. Hungry water finds it. The brush agitates it. And for the next twenty minutes, dissolved chalk and old oil residue tracks down the face of the glass in fine grey tears and dries there, because by then you have moved your ladderless self three houses along the road and the sun has come round onto the elevation.
There’s a second problem underneath the first. Pure water lifts what is loose and suspended; it does very little against anything chemically bonded to the surface, and old cylinder or early float glass in a city like this collects plenty of that – cement splash from someone’s repointing, or diesel film baked on through fifteen summers of the A501. That comes off with a 1-inch blade held flat and a bit of judgement about where the glass is too pitted to scrape. No brush head removes it, however many passes you make.
I have watched this happen on Thornhill Square more times than I care to write down. Customer comes out, looks up, sees streaking she didn’t have before, and reasonably concludes the man with the pole has made her windows worse. She isn’t wrong. She’s watching her own window frames wash themselves onto her glass.
The three-visit rule nobody mentions in the quote
Any honest pole operator will tell you that a neglected traditional terrace needs a settling-in period. The first clean lifts the loose contamination. The second gets what the first one loosened. By the third or fourth visit, on a four-to-six week cycle, the frames have stopped shedding and the glass finally comes up properly. That is a real phenomenon and I am not going to pretend it isn’t.
What I will say is that quoting a first clean at the standard rate and delivering a rinse is a bad piece of business. If the first pole clean on your terrace comes back streaky, you should not be paying full price for it. Fine.
Why Do Sash Horns and Glazing Bars Defeat a Brush Head?
A pole brush is a wide, soft-bristled tool with two jets behind it, designed to sweep a large uninterrupted plane. Victorian fenestration is the opposite of a large uninterrupted plane. A six-over-six sash gives you glazing bars 20mm wide with deep putty lines either side of them, a projecting meeting rail, and – on anything post-1870 – run-through horns hanging off the bottom of the upper sash like a pair of ears.
Bristles skate across all of that. They flick water into the rebate corners and out again without ever scrubbing the junction where the putty meets the glass, which is precisely the 3mm strip where London traffic film builds up thickest. You end up with a clean centre pane and a dirty grey perimeter on every single light. On a two-over-two that’s tolerable. On the eight-light bays along Cathnor Road in Brackenbury Village, you’re leaving forty-eight dirty margins on one elevation.
What a squeegee does in a rebate that a brush can’t
A traditional man puts an applicator into the corner with his thumb behind it, works the solution into the putty line, then pulls a 6-inch channel through the pane and detaches the last inch of water with a twisted scrim. The blade is a hard, straight edge with pressure behind it. A pole brush is a soft edge with no pressure at all beyond the weight of a wet bristle at twenty feet.
That’s it. That’s the whole mechanical argument, and no amount of fan jets or split brush heads gets round it.
Where Does All That Water End Up on a Timber Box Sash?
Here is the part that costs people money rather than looking bad. A box sash is a hollow frame – pulley stiles either side, weights hanging in the boxes, cords running over pulleys at the head. On a well-maintained window, that cavity stays dry. On a terrace where the paint has gone dull and the glazing bead has opened up, it does not.
Twenty-five litres of water an hour, delivered under pressure at the head of a window, will find every open joint in a sash frame. It goes past the pulley and into the box, where it sits on a cast-iron weight and stays put. I have pulled beads off windows in Walthamstow Village where the pocket piece was soft enough to press a thumb into, and the owners had never had anything worse than a pole operator visit fortnightly for six years. Whether that alone rotted the frame, I can’t say for certain. It didn’t help.
Traditional cleaning puts perhaps half a litre of warm solution on a whole window, controlled by hand, wiped off the cill before it travels. That difference matters most on the bottom rail and the cill nosing, where London rot always starts.
The lightwell problem on Telegraph Hill
South-east London terraces on Erlanger Road and around the Telegraph Hill slopes sit above open basement lightwells with railings at pavement level. Set your pole back far enough to clear the railings and your working angle to the second-floor sashes is now nearly vertical, so the run-off comes straight back down the pole onto your hands and the brush loses whatever contact pressure it had. Stand closer and you’re leaning over a 2.5-metre drop with a 12-metre pole. Neither is good. A traditional operator with a sectional ladder footed properly in the well solves it in ten minutes.
Does the London Terrace Itself Get in the Way?
Constantly. The pole needs three things – a place to stand, a sightline, and reach – and the London terrace was built with none of them in mind.
Front elevations give you a two-metre garden, a wheelie bin store, a hedge and a bay that projects a metre from the building line. Rear elevations give you a side return, an extension roof, and a fence you can’t get the hose over. Reach is the other one: a four-storey terrace with a lower ground floor puts the top sashes at fourteen or fifteen metres. Anything over about 45 feet of extended pole flexes badly enough that you are painting the glass with water rather than scrubbing it, and the heavier the head the worse it gets.
And the water itself is dearer here than the trade admits. Thames Water’s chalk supply comes out of the tap hard enough that a two-stage RO unit wastes three or four litres for every one it purifies, and the DI resin behind it exhausts fast on a full day of terraces. That cost lands somewhere, usually in a rushed clean rather than a higher price.
Then there’s the stone. Portland cills and moulded string courses. Rinse a top-floor sash and the water sheets down onto a filthy projecting cill, picks up sixty years of soot from the parapet and redeposits it on the sash below. You clean top-down, then the top-down rinse dirties what you just did.
Bays and the angle you cannot get
A canted bay has two side lights sitting at roughly 45 degrees to the front. From the pavement on Trevelyan Road in Tooting, you can see one of those cheeks and not the other. You cannot brush glass you cannot see. Operators know this and work by feel, which is why the return sides of bay windows are the first place I check when a customer says the last firm wasn’t quite right.
So When Should You Insist on the Pole Instead?
When the alternative is a man on a ladder against a Victorian cill that has never been load-tested. The Work at Height Regulations exist because ladders kill people, and a pole operator standing on the pavement is not going to fall off it.
Beyond safety: rear elevations with no ladder footing, converted flats where nobody can let you through, replacement uPVC sashes fitted in the 1990s where there’s no putty to leach and no timber to soak, conservatory roofs, and any building where the freeholder has banned ladders outright. Half of my Zone 2 portfolio is pole work for exactly these reasons and I wouldn’t change it.
Winter, and the bit where the pole loses outright
Below about minus two, a pole system is finished – the hose freezes solid and the film on the glass sets before it can run off. Traditional cleaning with a warm detergent solution carries on into a Hackney January without complaint. Those are the days when the old method is the only one that leaves the van.
The rest of the time I’d put it plainly: if your terrace has original timber sashes with soft putty and a bay at the front, ask for traditional on the front elevation and pole on the rear. Some firms will refuse to split it because it means two sets of kit on one job. Fine. Ring somebody who will. On a stock brick terrace with the original glass still in, the difference shows up in the corners, and the corners are the bit you look at from your own sofa.