Someone wants me to give them a quote for an office building. A lot of them have really bad water stains. I tested a window with CLR and it got most of it off but there is still a little bit left. Is there anything you guys would recomend? Also how do all of you price hard water stain removal?
This building has around 300 pains of glass and about half of them are stained. This is the first time I have quoted a job this big and if i got it it would really help me out.
Im honestly really curious how other price out Hard Water Stains removal?
What I normally do here in utah, we have really hard water, is use OneRestore, which is a medium acid, then afterwards scrub with some type of mild abrasive like the unger rub out or the titan hard water -its gray. Those two in combination, I have found works quite good.
Background, I do literally have a degree in biochemistry. So from what I can tell I believe it to be safe to mix those two. I wouldn’t just go around mixing products whilly knilly.
Oh another great product is Bio Clean from amazon. That stuff has a mild sealant in, so its easy to pitch to customers to upsell for a higher rate. I use that a bit.
@ EricD - hello and welcome. First thing would be to confirm that CLR is safe for glass and then get an MSDS. Take the time that it took you to get the first panel cleaned up and then multiply by the pane count based on that time. Add a little extra to account for supplies, materials, etc… Chemicals, PPE, towels…
I would find a water source near the building and check their TDS with a meter. The water staining is from the recycled sprinkler water? If you can get enough water in a sample bottle take it to a pool supply and have the water tested. They will tell you the make up the water and you can then look for a stain remover that is suited for the buildup, IE calcium or sulfur or whatever.
Once you determine the type of staining involved and the effort needed to remove it, call your window cleaning supplier like WCR or whomever you use and ask them for a recommendation based on known facts you have in your hand.
There really is no one size fits all for stain removal. I have tried most of them with varied results on different applications. The key is knowing what the stain is and hopefully how long it has been there. I hope this helps and best of luck.
Thanks that is good advice. What does MSDS stand for?
Thanks im definitely going to into those products.
MSDS is the acronym for Material Safety Data Sheet
It has all the information about a product regarding exposure health concerns, what temperature it catches fire at, basic make up of the product (solid, liquid, gas including melting and boiling temps) and basically anything else that could potentially make it dangerous, smell bad etc. I was on a job site once and the construction manager wanted to see the msds sheet for the screws we were using. And yes the manufacturer had one on the website so we had to have it in our job site trailer in our safety manual with all the other msds sheets for things like construction adhesive, the cleaning chemicals we were using etc.
These guys are spot on with looking into safety info, I just thought it might be worth mentioning that in case for some reason you have trouble finding the MSDS on any products, a few years ago some standards or something was being changed. They dropped the M so it should now be SDS.
Not trying to pick, you can probably find the same info either way but that’s just what I learned when updating the books on the carpet cleaning van I used to use.
Short clip from OSHA:
The Hazard Communication Standard (HCS) requires chemical manufacturers, distributors, or importers to provide Safety Data Sheets (SDSs) (formerly known as Material Safety Data Sheets or MSDSs) to communicate the hazards of hazardous chemical products.