Residential Exterior Cleaning Services: Every Service, Defined

The eight residential exterior cleaning services, defined

Window cleaning removes film and mineral from glass on both sides of the pane. Hard water stain removal is a separate restoration service that dissolves bonded calcium and silica ordinary washing leaves behind. Screen cleaning washes insect mesh and frames by hand, off the window. Gutter cleaning empties troughs and downspouts of leaf pack and shingle grit so roof water reaches the ground where it was designed to land. House washing is a soft wash: a dilute cleaning solution applied at under 100 PSI to siding, stucco, soffits, and painted trim. Pressure washing drives 2,000 to 4,000 PSI at concrete, pavers, and unsealed brick. Solar panel cleaning rinses dust and pollen off an array with pure water and no pressure. Holiday light installation is the seasonal service: lights are hung, powered, and taken down afterward. Reflekt Window Cleaning of Meridian, Idaho performs all eight, plus commercial and property-manager programs, which are the same services on a scheduled route.

Glass work is three separate services, not one

Glass is billed as three line items because it is three different amounts of labor. Standard window cleaning at Reflekt starts at $199 and is quoted by pane count rather than square footage; a pane is one piece of glass, so a single grid-divided window can hold six of them. Screen cleaning adds $50 and is done off the window by hand, because insect mesh tears at a small fraction of the pressure that cleans concrete. Hard water stain removal is quoted only after someone looks at the glass, since the price depends on how deep the mineral has gone. Reflekt cleans exterior glass with 100% pure deionized water and no soap: with the dissolved solids stripped out, the water dries off the pane leaving nothing behind, and no detergent film stays to catch dust. Reflekt calls that finish RainShield and backs exterior glass with a 7-day rain guarantee.

Gutter cleaning protects the structure, not the appearance

Gutter cleaning is structural maintenance that only looks like housekeeping. A packed trough sends roof water over the lip, down the fascia, and into the soil against the foundation. In the Treasure Valley that matters most from November through March, when the freeze-thaw cycle runs daily: water standing in a blocked gutter freezes overnight, backs up under the shingle edge, and melts again by afternoon. Reflekt's gutter cleaning starts at $199 and covers clearing the troughs, flushing the downspouts, and hauling the debris. Frequency is set by trees, not by house size. A young subdivision with no mature canopy usually needs one visit a year; deciduous trees inside the drip line push it to two; pines, spruce, or cottonwoods overhanging the roof push it to three or four, because needles pack tighter than leaves and never fully break down. Gutter guards lengthen the interval but do not remove the visit.

House washing and pressure washing are separated by pressure, not by price

The line between house washing and pressure washing is how much force reaches the surface, and crossing it is the most expensive mistake available in exterior cleaning. House washing is a soft wash held under 100 PSI, roughly garden-hose force, where a diluted solution does the cleaning chemically over five to ten minutes of dwell time before it is rinsed off. That is the correct method for vinyl and lap siding, stucco, painted wood, soffits, and gutter exteriors, all of which either carry a coating or have a cavity behind them. Pressure washing runs 2,000 to 4,000 PSI and belongs on concrete driveways, sidewalks, patios, pavers, and unsealed brick. Reflekt prices house washing at $0.18 per square foot of wall area and pressure washing at $0.20 per square foot of hard surface, so 1,800 square feet of siding runs about $324 and a 600-square-foot driveway about $120.

Solar panel cleaning and holiday lighting run on the calendar

Two of the eight services are scheduled by season rather than by how dirty something looks. Treasure Valley solar arrays typically give up 2 to 6 percent of annual output to soiling, and the loss peaks in late August after ninety-plus dry days of farm dust, pollen, and wildfire ash accumulate with no rain to rinse them off. Reflekt cleans panels with deionized water, no pressure, and no abrasives, because a wand aimed at a frame seal endangers the panel rather than the dirt. Cleaning pays best on large, low-tilt arrays near gravel roads or open ground; a steep array through a wet spring largely rinses itself. Holiday light installation gets booked in October and early November, ahead of the first hard freeze, because the supply of workable ladder days before the season starts is what actually limits scheduling, not demand.

What each service costs, how often it is due, and what order to book it in

Reflekt's starting rates: window cleaning from $199 by pane count, screen cleaning $50, gutter cleaning from $199, pressure washing $0.20 per square foot, and soft-wash house washing $0.18 per square foot. Hard water stain removal and solar panel cleaning are quoted after assessment. Typical Treasure Valley intervals: exterior glass twice a year, or quarterly where pressurized canal irrigation sprays the windows all summer; gutters one to three times a year by tree cover; siding every 12 to 24 months; concrete every 12 to 18 months. Order matters when several services land in one visit. Work top down — gutters first, house wash second, windows third, concrete last — because each job sends dirty water onto the surface below it. Reflekt's Monthly and Quarterly memberships hold a recurring slot with no contract and include a free annual screen cleaning, and same-day and next-day slots are often open.

What Reflekt does not clean, and which services most homes can skip

Reflekt does not clean roofs, does not repair or replace glass, and will not pressure wash siding at any price, including when a homeowner asks for it directly. A fogged pane is a failed insulated-glass seal; no cleaning on either side of that glass reaches moisture sealed inside the unit, which makes it a glazing repair rather than a cleaning job. Glass etched by years of sprinkler spray often improves substantially under hard water treatment but may not come back fully clear. Several services here are also skippable in a given year: one season of dry dust on siding rinses off with a garden hose for free, a treeless new subdivision rarely needs a second gutter visit, and a steep array after a wet spring may not need cleaning at all. Exterior work also stops being practical below about 35 degrees, which in this valley usually means December through February.