Can You Use Dish Soap for Window Cleaning? 

Professional window cleaners often use dish soaps like Dawn or Joy to help their window cleaning squeegees glide. However, dish soaps are degreasers made up of almost 100% surfactants, so they have a lot of suds. (More on that in a minute.)

As Alan Noah of Titan Laboratories explained, "Surfactants are wonderful little two-headed creatures. One head loves water and the other hates it. So, when you get them wet, they go crazy." While this is great for cleaning fabrics because the surfactants move through the material to loosen dirt, it's bad for glass.

The problem comes when you mix surfactants with calcium (i.e., hard water) because they create a soapy scum. “Chemical blenders know this so they add a foaming agent, such as sodium lauryl sulfate, to produce artificial bubbles or foam. That’s supposed to make you think it’s working.”

However, what you really get is a blend of the soap scum mixed with the calcium, in turn creating a sludge-like goop that fills the microscopic pores on the surface of the glass and slowly destroys window tracks.

These microscopic pores are created during the glass-making process. When glass is manufactured, it has to cool down from 2800°F, and this is done through a process called “floating.” The glass “rides on a river of molten tin.” As glass cools, it shrinks and solidifies. The bottom side of the glass is perfectly smooth, but the top side has microscopic pits and pores. This is where dish soap’s cleaning “goop” collects.

Glass Gleam 4 (GG-4), on the other hand, not only avoids creating goop, it removes it from the pores, leaving window cleaner, longer.

“The glass now sparkles as it bounces the light freely off the many pits and pores, like a diamond. And since the dew doesn’t cause the window to weep, it stays clean for a very long time.”

Why Isn't Glass Gleam Slick Like Dish Soap? 

Most window cleaners entering the business learn to fan with a squeegee using dish soap. “This teaches you to grip hard and press hard because the surfactant gives you a ton of glide,” Alan Noah of Titan Laboratories explained. “However, that’s pretty much all it gives you!” 

When you switch to Glass Gleam 4 (GG4), the glide isn’t there. “We actually thought window cleaners would appreciate not having to use so much pressure. In fact, I used to say, ‘if you don’t like the slip, just loosen your grip.’” But, people kept saying they just added a squirt of dish soap to add glide, which means were also creating buildup. “Now they’ve wrecked GG-4’s main purpose of clearing out those pores.” 

After researching the issue, Titan Labs couldn’t find a slip additive that wasn’t “just more dish soap,” so they formulated their own out of distilled silicon to make Glass Gleam Glide. “Nothing to it, and there’s no foam or goop in the sill to slow you down.”

Glass  Gleam Glide

Which Glass Gleam Do I Need: GG3 or GG4?

Glass Gleam 3

GG3 reduces drag on squeegees as it stays wet longer and has a pleasant fragrance. This will leave no haze, even on polymer treated surfaces. There is almost no bleed back with the high visibility orange color. This product is biodegradable with no phosphates, ammonia, or hazardous chemicals.

Glass Gleam 4

GG4 provides all the benefits as GG3, but Titan Glass Gleam 4  is designed to work well with hard water.

GG4 stays wet longer on hot or windy days and does not foam up. This product is biodegradable with no phosphates, ammonia, or hazardous chemicals and leaves no haze, even on polymer treated surfaces.