High Reach Window Cleaning Equipment

High reach window cleaning equipment is anything that cleans glass above head height from ground level. In practice it is two methods: a squeegee on a telescopic pole up to about nine metres, and a purified-water brush on a water-fed pole above that. Which one you need is decided by the height of the highest pane, not by the size of the building.

What reach do you need

Reach is always quoted at full extension, and a pole is used at an angle rather than straight up, so allow roughly a metre less than the number on the box. A storey of South African residential glass is about three metres.

Highest glass	Pole reach	Method
Ground floor, shopfront	2 m	squeegee on a pole
Single storey, stairwell, double volume	4 m	squeegee on a pole
Double storey	6 m	squeegee on a pole
Triple storey	9 m	squeegee on a pole, or water-fed
Above three storeys	9 m and up	water-fed pole, purified water

Those first four rows are all squeegee work, and they are served by the same family of poles.

Telescopic poles: up to nine metres

A telescopic pole is aluminium, extends in sections and closes down for transport — a 2 m pole closes to 1 m, a 9 m pole closes to 3 m. It takes the same thread as a squeegee or a scraper, so one pole carries both tools. This is the cheapest way to get off a ladder and it covers the large majority of domestic and shopfront work. Browse telescopic window cleaning poles.

What it cannot do is keep the glass wet long enough at height, which is where the second method starts.

Water-fed poles: above three storeys

A water-fed pole carries purified water up the pole to a brush head. The glass is scrubbed and rinsed, then left to dry on its own with no squeegee and no detailing. It dries without marks because the dissolved solids have been stripped out of the water first, by reverse osmosis or de-ionising resin — ordinary tap water would dry to a spotted film. Poles run to 9 m in aluminium and fibreglass, with fibreglass stiffer and lighter at full extension. Browse water fed poles, and pure water systems for the purification stage that feeds them.

The same pole and brush arrangement is what cleans solar arrays, with one difference in the head.

High reach on solar panels

Panels are cleaned from the ground for the same reason windows are: nobody should be walking on an array. The equipment is a rotating soft brush on a telescopic pole fed with purified water. A pressure washer must never be used on a panel, as it drives water past the seals. See solar panel cleaning equipment.

Buying the parts together

For squeegee work up to nine metres the pole, squeegee and washer are sold matched, which removes the thread-size problem — see window cleaning kits. The full range sits under window cleaning equipment.