'It's the future - simple as that'
March 1st 2006

"It's the future - simple as that" Training is an important for a number of reasons: Steering your business in the right direction; learning new techniques; ensuring compliance with the latest health & safety rules. Tim McManan-Smith recently attended a water-fed pole course at the British Window Cleaning Academy in Swindon

The British Window Cleaning Academy (BWCA) runs four courses at the moment: health & safety, one-day skills course, marketing and water-fed poles. They take place in the new purpose-built 5000 sq ft premises replacing the old 1300 sq ft building in Swindon.

The BWCA has also opened a new training facility in Newcastle and has the use of a facility in Edinburgh to increase its national coverage.

I attended the water-fed poles course to see what the BWCA had to offer. The day started with an introduction on how water-fed poles and associated equipment works and how to get the best out it. Craig Mawlam, course trainer and managing director of Ionic Systems, noticed while working as a window cleaner that when he cleaned a canopy it always looked better when it was washed clean with rain. This led him to take a look at pole systems and why they sometimes worked well and sometimes not. He brought a Tucker pole over from America and started to develop a system that would work consistently.

The answer was a need for pure water. White streaks occured on some jobs and not on others because the job was in a hard water area. When pure water is used to wash a window with a pole it not only eliminates white streaks, but because it is so pure it has a chemical tendancy to 'want' to absorb impurities and so acts as a good cleaning agent. This is also kinder to the environment than using large quantities of chemical cleaning agents.

After explaining the pros and cons for achieving soft water (demineralisation and reverse osmosis), Craig suggested that reverse osmosis was the best option and that the new Pro7 from Ionics had an advatange in that it recirculated 100% of the water. This has good environmental potential rather than pouring pure water down the drain. Although mention was made of Ionics products there was no selling of the system within the context of the course and it provided a fairly independent and unbiased look at water-fed pole technology.

One window cleaner from Helston suggested that by incorporating water-fed pole technology within his window cleaning operation it was "like starting a new business ". The opportunities that were not available without the technology or may become difficult in the future with new health & safety regulations such as Working at Height mean that he is now in a position to gain business that wasn't otherwise on offer.

While talking to another window cleaner from Sudbury I asked why he was there. His answer was succinct: "It's the future; simple as that".

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