Can you pressure wash windows?
No. Don't pressure wash windows. The force breaches the seals around the glass, drives water into frames and tracks, and can crack the pane outright. The professional method is a water-fed pole running pure water — it lifts the grime and dries spot-free, with the tracks finished by hand. Schmick window cleaning starts at $150.
The pressure that cleans concrete wrecks glass
A pressure washer throws a narrow jet hard enough to strip paint, etch pavers and lift moss off a driveway. That is the whole point of the tool. Point it at a window and you are aiming a jet built for masonry at a sheet of glass and a run of soft rubber seal. The glass is the part most people worry about, and it can crack — a chip on the edge, a stress point near a fixing, an older pane that was never toughened, and the jet finds it.
But the glass is rarely the first thing to fail. The bead of sealant and the rubber gaskets around the pane are softer than the glass and sit right in the firing line. Held close, a pressure jet chews the edge of that seal, works into the gap and starts lifting it away from the frame. Once the seal is compromised the window is no longer weathertight, and you have created a problem that a cloth was never going to cause.
Water goes where the jet sends it
Windows are designed to shed rain that runs down them under gravity. They are not designed to hold back water fired sideways and upward at pressure. Aim a washer at the joint between frame and wall and you drive water behind the frame, into the track, and through any gap the seal has already given up. On timber frames that means swelling and rot you cannot see until the paint bubbles. On the wall behind, it means damp plaster and staining that shows up weeks later, well after you have forgotten the clean that caused it.
Tracks and sills are the worst offender. They are full of small drainage holes and channels, and a pressure jet pushes grit and water straight past them into the cavity rather than flushing it out. Trapped moisture sits there and does its slow work. None of this is dramatic on the day — the window looks clean and wet and fine. The cost lands later, as water damage inside a wall is one of the more expensive and avoidable messes a home can develop.
Pure water is the trick, not pressure
The professional method uses almost no pressure at all. A water-fed pole feeds purified water through a brush head on a telescopic pole. The brush agitates the dirt, the water rinses it, and the whole job is done at roughly the pressure of a garden tap. Nothing is forced anywhere. The seals stay sealed, the tracks stay drained, and there are no ladders leaning against your gutters — a two-storey window is reached from the ground with the pole.
The clever part is the water. Ordinary tap water carries dissolved minerals, and when it dries on glass those minerals are the white spots and streaks you are trying to get rid of. The pole runs deionised or filtered water with the minerals stripped out, so it dries clean off the glass with nothing left behind. No squeegee, no towelling, no streaks — the window sheets off and dries spot-free on its own. That is the result pressure washing cannot give you, however hard you push.
Tracks and sills are a hand job
A pole cleans the glass and the frame face beautifully, but it cannot get into the runners, the corners of the sill or the little drainage slots. Those are done by hand — brushed loose, wiped out, and cleared so the window drains the way it was built to. It is slower and less glamorous than blasting, and it is exactly the part a pressure washer gets catastrophically wrong by packing grit deeper instead of removing it.
Being straight about it: clean windows are cosmetic and functional, not structural. Washing them will not fix a seal that has already perished or a frame that is already rotting — that is a repair, not a clean, and we will tell you so rather than paper over it. What a proper clean does is remove the grime and hard-water spotting, clear the tracks, and leave the whole assembly working and looking sharp, without introducing water where it should never go.
What clean windows actually cost
Window cleaning with Schmick starts at $150. Most single-storey homes land between $150 and $550, priced by the number of windows rather than a vague hourly guess, and a two-storey place adds roughly 40% for the extra height and access. It is a firm number, not a maybe. If you are already booking a house soft wash or a gutter clean, bundling them onto the one visit saves between 5 and 15%, and the Schmick Plan rolls regular cleans into a flat monthly fee from $89.
You do not have to wait for someone to come and squint at your house to find out the price. The instant quote returns a firm, bookable figure in about 60 seconds — you tell it the property, it gives you the number, and that number holds unless the place turns out to be materially different from what you described. Skip the pressure washer, skip the guesswork, and get your exact price for spot-free windows.