 What are the best cleaning supplies for windows? Is it paper towels, coffee filters, or newspapers? We're going to talk about that today. Hi there, I'm Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. Now, today's show is brought to us by Savvy Cleaner Training, where in Savvy Cleaner Training we take you on a series of all the different tools and techniques you need to clean a variety of different things inside your home and the homes of your customers. So check it out at SavvyCleaner.com. All right, on to today's show. We have a house cleaner or a homeowner that called in and asked this question. Hi, Angela. Was wondering what wipes, glass, and mirrors best? Is it coffee filters, newspapers, or paper towels? Thanks. All right, so you spooked me a little bit when you asked about the coffee filters or the newspapers or paper towels. So the answer to your question is none of those. All right, the very first thing about coffee filters is they're very expensive. And so if you're cleaning all of your windows and I have 55 windows in my house, so do you know how many coffee filters that would take if I were to try to wipe dry all of the windows in my house? That would be a lot of coffee filters, right? That's expensive. All right, the second thing is newspapers. They just really don't make newspapers anymore. Now, when I started my house cleaning business almost three decades ago, everybody had newspapers and there were extra newspapers to go around and people did in fact dry their windows and their mirrors with newspapers. That was a solution, but everything has moved online now and nobody's making newspapers anymore, so they come out of premium cost because they're so hard to find. So newspapers, not anymore. That was once the way, but not anymore. And paper towels. All right, now I'm a huge fan of paper towels. I love paper towels, but they're really not very kind to the environment. Now here's the reason why. They are biodegradable, but it takes about a year for paper towels to break down in the environment. So if you're using a lot of paper towels, and like I said, I got 55 windows in my house. So if I was going to use paper towels to dry all of those windows, that's a lot of paper towels going into the landfill, right? When the paper towels are made, they are made from recycled materials. So they take shredded paper from office buildings and they use those and they make a pulp and out of the pulp, they create paper towels. And then from that, they bleach the pulp so that they're white and shiny and they look all nice, right? So there's bleach and there's other stuff that is inside the paper towels that's a coloring in different agents that then make it not so friendly to the environment. Okay, so that said, when we're spraying chemicals on our mirrors and our counters and all these things, the purpose of paper towels is to wipe up cleaning chemicals and gunk, right? So now those cleaning chemicals that we wiped up on the paper towels are now inside the paper towels and those two go to the landfill. So it's kind of a sad story. We love paper towels, they're super great for a lot of things, but we use them very sparingly because of the landfill issue. All right, so what do you do to clean your windows? All right, there's actually a two-step process and I love the process because it involves microfiber cloths. Now microfiber cloths are also a challenge to the environment because they're not biodegradable, but you can use a cloth for up to 500 washes if you buy a high-quality cleaning cloth that's made of microfiber, which is also made of recycled plastic, okay? So what we do is we take a cloth and it doesn't matter what color of cloth that you use because the first cloth that you use is going to be a wedding cloth. Now we're going to use this process because you won't need any chemicals whatsoever for your glass, your glass tabletops, your mirrors, and the outsides of the shower doors. Now the insides you're going to have soap scum, so you will use some cleaning chemicals, but the outsides where there's just dust and droplets of water, you can just use the water method. All right, so what you're going to do, this has a pile that's a little bit thicker than our glass drying towel. So we're going to use two towels, but the first one is a wedding towel. Again, it doesn't matter what color you use, but pick one color and always use it for the wedding cloth for your glass. We're going to wet it and we're going to wipe down the mirror in a Z pattern. Now the reason we use a Z pattern is so that if we go in circles on our mirror, the part that's dirty down here, we're taking back up over the clean part on the top of the mirror. So we do not want to go in circles, we want to go in a Z pattern across our mirrors. That makes sense. All right, now with the other hand, we have a drying cloth, and the drying cloth, I've only seen them in blue, this light blue, and it's a very fine pile. It's a very thin, skinny drying cloth, and this is a very special, very expensive cloth that is also made of microfiber. This is designed as a glass cloth, this is a drying cloth. So we're going to wet with one hand our mirror, and with the other hand, we're going to dry the mirror. So we can wet and dry simultaneously, two hands, two cloths. Now, I'm going to share a secret with you. If you take the cloth and you fold it in half, and then you fold it in half again, you now have eight sides that you can dry a mirror with. So we have side one, side two, then we open it up, and we have side three, and side four, and then we open it up again, and we fold it the opposite way. When we fold it the opposite way, that gives us four more sides. So we have side five, six, seven, and eight. So we have eight sides to the one cloth. So you can do it that way, and also with the wedding cloth. This gives you eight mirrors or eight windows with which you can wet one side, one side to wipe it down, one side to dry it. Then you're going to flip it over, and you're going to do the next window, right? One side to wet it, one side to dry it. Then you'll stop, and you'll turn your cloth inside out, and you'll do the same on both sides. That way you can do eight panels with one cloth of each side. All right. That, my friend, is how you clean windows and the proper tools that you use. Now, when you're done, the microfiber cloths are separate. You wash them separately in separate loads of laundry, or you can do the same load of laundry if you have a mesh bag. With a mesh bag, it separates this from this, and that will prevent lint from picking up on your microfiber cloths, so they are always ready to go for your next window cleaning. All right, that's how you do it. I hope it helps. If you found this helpful, please pass it on to a friend. If we've earned your subscription, please subscribe, and until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.