9th October 2022 General

Building Exterior Cleaning Companies

When you are looking for building exterior cleaning companies, you should ask yourself, what type of surface do I require cleaning?

Distinct types of surfaces usually require distinct types of equipment to get the clean you require.

Cladding surfaces require soft washing equipment to clean the exterior. Usually, the surfaces facing North first attract organic matter growth. Other elevations follow later. It is essential to kill off the growth to avoid it re-growing quickly.

Stone on older buildings will require doff steam cleaning to satisfy English Heritage that no rules are being broken and only competently trained stone cleaners are employed by you to conduct the work.

Rendered facades are quite common on office and apartment buildings and require soft washing to make sure they are not damaged by harsh pressure. North facing elevations are affected quicker than other elevations. 100% killing off the spores is essential to avoid regrowth.

Concrete structures usually require pressure washing, they are strong enough to be blasted by high powered water.

Brick often requires the use of brick acid, followed by hot pressure washing. Care must be taken to avoid loosening the mortar between the bricks.

Flat roof cleaning on offices and data centres require the soft washing method to avoid damage to the delicate membranes used to keep water out.

When searching for experienced exterior building cleaning companies you should also consider the following.

Is your building low level, say seven floors (21 metres – 70 feet) or more?

Why is the height important?

When looking at building exterior cleaning companies many of them will be able to manage seven floors (21 metres – 70 feet). This is because seven floors are not extremely high in the exterior façade cleaning world.

The use of mewps that go beyond twenty-one metres would be the first and most economical method to reach and clean high level exterior surfaces.

Some buildings have their own access cradle installed on the roof.  Competent persons must inspect the equipment annually at least.

Abseiling can be the most expensive method to clean outside your building. In many cases abseilers do not fully understand the cleaning methods required to get the best results for you. You would be better off choosing only abseilers from the cleaning industry.

What Type of Company Should You Be Looking For?

When choosing building exterior cleaning companies you should also consider where to find the most experienced cleaning company for your building type.

For example, should you ask the daily office cleaning company to organise this for you? I would suggest this is not the smartest idea. This is because their speciality is in daily internal cleaning and not external cleaning, there is a difference.

What about the window cleaners with those long reach water fed poles?

They use purified water to clean glass.

They usually do a wonderful job.

You should ask yourself why does pure water (H2o) do such an excellent job?

Pure H2o is volatile and over time causes damage to other building materials by stripping away the top layer.

Using water fed poles on cladding is not the best solution for your building’s exterior cleaning project.

Pure water does not kill off organic spores they will regrow quickly, for instance.

You would be well advised doing your own research on exterior building cleaning companies and find out for yourself “have they” cleaned a building like yours before, for instance.

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