[windowwashers]

Regular cleaning with pure water makes bird muck 95%(ish) of the time melt away because the glass surfaces if cleaner not as sticky, you get the odd ones that are a right pain to remove.

Using tap/waste then re washing with pure is wasting time and money IMO, water is cheap time for most is not.

I guess it is how much time you are willing to waste doing this, and please dont think I am knocking you for the idea, I just cant see it working from where I am sat and thats my opinion on it, right or wrong.

Keep thinking of  new ideas though I am all ears (always )

Ian

[windowwashers]

Although I haven't tried this yet, I wonder if using a trigger might not be a far more effective way of saving water.

The idea is to wet the window and then turn the water off and give a little scrub, soak, scrub, soak, scrub as much as may be needed and then rinse.

The idea being to allow both the purity of the water and the agitation of the brush both do their fair share of the work. I'm convinced that probably most of the torrents of water I use isn't doing very much good. Maybe an occasional trickle of water and a scrub would be more effective at washing and then just a quick torrent for rinsing.

I've certainly used this technique on tenacious bird poo. I won't leave 2 litres of water per minute flowing while I'm scrubbing a tiny bit of baked-on mucus. It's a quick blast, then a scrub, then a blast and scrub until it's gone.

Sry for double post put that is a very good point, I turn water off if I get stuck on muck I didnt used to but it really is  wate, triggers I have not used either something that I will try

[Bazzy1999]

My point is.. cant we use our waste water to clean and our pure water to rinse..

Ive tried it on my own windows and its perfect...

Bazz...

[windowwashers]

My point is.. cant we use our waste water to clean and our pure water to rinse..

Ive tried it on my own windows and its perfect...

Bazz...

I 100% get your point, it is time and money I would look at first from a business point of view

[michael papworth]

My point is.. cant we use our waste water to clean and our pure water to rinse..

Ive tried it on my own windows and its perfect...

Bazz...

If that is the question, then the answer is, Yes, you can. You CAN use ordinary tap water or even waste from the RO unit to clean the window and then use pure to rinse.

If you reframe the question to ask:

"Is it worthwhile to use ordinary tap water or even waste from the RO unit to clean the window and then use pure to rinse?"

You will find that you get different answers. It depends on what you mean by worthwhile.

* Is it cost effective? Probably not as you would need to modify your gear to provide you with two water supplies.

* Is it logistically worthwhile? Probably not as it doubles up on many of the factors you need to consider.

* Is it time effective? Probably not as pure water certainly cleans quicker and better than regular tap water.

* Is it ecologically effective? A very difficult one to answer, that one. You need to consider more than just the water wastage. You also need to consider the energy costs of transport and storage etc. The equations are notoriously difficult to set up.

(As an example, everyone thinks that solar electricity is a wonderful idea. Hey, energy for free! Wrong. It isn't free. The amount of energy consumed to collect, process and transport the raw materials, and then manufacture, store, transport, fit and maintain the panel takes about twenty years for the panel to repay.)

A general principle in life is KISS - Keep It Short and Simple.

Using a single supply of pure is the simplest approach.

You question is a very valuable one. Maybe it could be reframed even better.

How can we optimise our cleaning techniques?

How can we get the windows and frames cleanest in the quickest time and using the least amount of resources in the simplest way?

[Clive McDonald]

Bazzy it's a trade off. I sacrifice water for speed.

Wally. Use  machines to take the work out of cleaning windows. My active ingredient machine is a a Rinnai 54eu. This excites the molecules (brownian movement) and does the work for me. I agree with Kiss. Bazzy was right about bird poo.

[Paul Coleman]

My point is.. cant we use our waste water to clean and our pure water to rinse..

Ive tried it on my own windows and its perfect...

Bazz...

I take your point but personally, I wouldn't feel happy about it because I would be concerned about the quality of the job.  I suspect the pure water saving would be less than expected because in order to ensure that all the tap/waste water was removed from the window, surely it would be necessary to rinse a lot more with pure water?  Of course I've never tried it so can only guess.

[LWC Ltd]

If you use DI only you can do this without need for two tanks:

Have 1 DI vessel on input hose - this will bring TDS down, but you can let it rise to a level you are happy with (eg. 15, 20 or somehting) 2nd DI vessel  on output side bringing down to zero.

The water in the tank is 20 or so.

All you need then is to switch between the tank at 20 for first clean and then switch to pure to finish.

Saves resin. And DI has no waste water.

[wightsurf]

How about on bigger jobs work in a team of two one pure water, the other tap water.

[michael papworth]

Still missing the point:

* Tap water isn't very good for cleaning without the addition of detergents.

* Pure water is good for cleaning without the addition of detergents.

If you use straight tap water as a cleaning agent, you are going to have to use a great deal more of it, because it isn't very good for cleaning. That immediately negates any water savings you might make.

If you use tap water with the addition of detergents, you are going to have to use a great deal more pure to rinse it all away. That negates any savings you might make.

Using tap water is only going to make your life more difficult and the savings are either insignificant or possibly negative.

I'm sure that there are better ways of saving water simply by being more discriminating when the flow is on or off.

I'd suggest a regime of:

water on- soak
water off - scrub

as many times as is necessary to get the window clean. (Most of the time it will only be once.)

and then rinse.

I suspect that this would save a great deal of water whilst simplifying rather than complicating matters.

[Rob.Hall]

Time and motion.

To much time and to much motion.

Like the idea but does not seem practical.

I think Wally and a few others have hit the answer on the head.

Dont want to sound negative but it does seem a lot more work.

[Londoner]

Have you ever tried washing clean a paintbrush thats been used with emusion paint? Because the paint is water soluble you would think a quick rinse and its clean.

In reality, you rinse and rinse and the colour is still coming out of the brush. This will be what happens to your brush if you use tap water. You will trap bad water in the bristles and it will still be leeching out after you think its all gone.