Quarter to seven on a Tuesday. The forecast said showers, which you could have worked through. What is actually out there is a steady 30 mph with gusts on top, the pole is going to be a sail, and the 22 jobs on today's sheet are not getting done. Wednesday looks the same.
So you have a rained off window cleaning week, or most of one, and by Thursday night you are doing arithmetic on your phone that does not work. One trade guide puts the expected annual loss at 10 to 25 working days. Indicative rather than gospel, but it means this is not an emergency. It happens a few times a year and needs a standard response. Most of the rules for window cleaning in bad weather are not about rain.
Wind is what stops the day, not rain
The public thinks rain stops window cleaning. It mostly does not. Wind does.
Federation of Window Cleaners guidance says water-fed pole use is not recommended above 25 mph. One UK firm publishes that wind is usually the single reason it cannot work, and carries anemometers, with the final call left to whoever holds the pole. Another draws the line above three storeys in high wind, which is where a 40-foot pole stops being a tool and starts being a lever.
The other hard stops
Shorter list. Lightning and electrical storms, named explicitly in the FWC guidance. Ice and frost, where you are freezing water onto the glass, fighting a frozen hose and making a slip hazard on somebody's path. Snow. If you do work in frost, grit the path where your water is going to land.
Lightning, ice and snow settle themselves, and nobody argues with them. Wind is the awkward one, and not because it is vague. There is a number, 25 mph, and you can hold an anemometer up and read it off. The trouble is that it is a trade number. Rain is the excuse the public expects and accepts. Wind is what actually costs you the day, and the one nobody at number 14 will quite believe.
Almost nobody catches up after a rained off window cleaning week
Ask on the forums how to catch up a window cleaning round after a wash-out and the experienced answer is: don't. Resume where you stopped and let the whole round slide a week.
Doubling up costs you more than it recovers
The reason is density. Your round works because Tuesday is one estate and Wednesday is another, and you do 20-odd houses in a day because they sit within a few streets of each other. Double up and you are not doing 44 houses, you are doing maybe 28, and driving between two areas to manage it. The extra driving, setting up and talking is the exact cost a well planned round is built to avoid, and it all comes straight back the moment you spread a day out. Thrown away to fix a problem the customers have not noticed.
They mostly have not noticed
Cleaners who have run weeks late for years report that the only people who ever mentioned it were one or two older customers, the ones in all day who know when you were last there. One solo cleaner who had convinced himself a week off would take two months to unwind was told flatly by several regulars that it matters far less than he thinks.
What loses customers is a job done badly, or a cleaner who stops being predictable. A round that runs a week late and says so is neither.
The ways back, and what each one costs
Three recoveries, in the order most cleaners reach for them.
- Let the whole round slide a week. Resume where you stopped and push every date back by seven days, later rather than earlier, so the order of the round is untouched. Do it on the sheet rather than by drift: move every customer's date, not just Tuesday's lot, and you still know where you stand in March. Costs nothing in cash or goodwill. Costs you cycle adherence. Fine once, dangerous three times in a winter with no pull-back.
- Extra days, weekends included. One firm works six days a week year round, admits it still falls behind in winter, and picks up Sundays after a bad spell. It works. It costs your Sunday.
- Sell a smaller clean. A reduced-price downstairs-only visit beats no visit at all when conditions are marginal.
Whichever you pick, come back oldest-first, so nobody quietly ends up on eight weeks while the people you drove past get done on schedule.
What to do with the wet day itself
That is the round sorted. The day sitting in front of you is a separate question. If it is genuinely unworkable it is a free admin day: the owing list, the price rise letters, the customers whose last clean date you are unsure of.
Fixed days make the week afterwards easier
Fixed-day rounds explain themselves after a wash-out. If the Baddow Road lot know they are every fourth Monday, a lost Monday just means next Monday, and you send nothing at all. A wash-out is where fixed days show their value most plainly.
Where letting it slide starts to cost you money
That is the case for doing nothing, and it is a good one. It has one limit: permanent drift.
A 4-weekly round that slides to 6-weekly does not stay a late 4-weekly round. It becomes a 6-weekly round, because the customers settle into the new gap and stop expecting the old one. Try to pull them back afterwards and you are the one who turned up early.
Count it out. A 4-weekly round is 52 ÷ 4 = 13 cleans a year. A 6-weekly round is 52 ÷ 6 = 8.7 cleans a year. That is 13 - 8.7 = 4.3 cleans per customer gone, roughly a third of the annual value, from an accident rather than a decision. Worth reading properly: what each frequency is actually worth.
Six weeks of dirt takes longer than four
It feeds itself, as well. Six weeks of dirt takes longer to shift than four weeks of it, so the day runs late, so next cycle starts later still. FWC guidance notes that neglected glass may need two or three cleans before it reaches an acceptable standard with a water-fed pole. So the customer eight weeks overdue is not just a late job. It is a slow job that may look like poor work when you get there, and you will be apologising for a result the gap caused.
Sliding a week is free. Sliding a cycle is not. That is the whole distinction.
What to send when the wind takes your day
The night-before message is the norm now, by text or WhatsApp, often from a no-reply number and often doubling as a reminder to leave the side gate open. When the weather turns, the same channel does the recovery, though if you run fixed days most of the round needs none of it:
Morning. I was due at yours today but the wind has stopped me using the pole safely. You have not been skipped. You are still on the list and I will be with you on Monday. Nothing needed at your end.
Cleaning in the rain, argued both ways
Rain, unlike wind, is a judgement call. Both sides, then how to call the day.
The case for working through it
Plenty of firms publish, almost word for word, that rain does not matter. The argument is a real one. With pure water there is no detergent residue left on the glass, so falling rain has nothing to cling to. Rain itself is close to pure, so it does not spot as it dries. On that reasoning a wet day is a normal working day and the customer's objection is cosmetic.
The case against, which is more technical than you would think
Rain is not pure. It picks up airborne dust on the way down, including Saharan dust, plus bacteria and dissolved solids. One cleaner measured collected rainwater at 10 to 20 ppm TDS, against the roughly 10 ppm most people work to out of the resin. If that is right, what is landing on the pane is dirtier than what you are rinsing with. Others report spotting after windy rain specifically, dust settling on glass that is already wet, and callbacks following.
How to call it on the day
It turns on conditions rather than principle, so the question to ask is what kind of rain is falling, not which camp is correct. Still rain is a different substance from horizontal rain after a dry spell, when there is dust in the air waiting to come down with it. Judge the day, not the argument. The trade itself has not settled it: the pro-rain camp report no callbacks despite publishing a rain guarantee, which is either evidence they are right or evidence their customers do not look closely.
What your terms should say
Four lines, each one settling an argument before it starts.
A rain guarantee, which almost nobody claims
A guarantee defuses the rain argument before it starts: a free return visit within 24 hours if the customer is unhappy with a clean done in the rain. The firms that publish one report almost nobody claiming it.
A late clean and a cancelled clean are not the same thing
A late clean costs you time. A skipped clean costs you money. That difference is the asymmetry firms build into their terms deliberately, and it is why the night-before message is not an invitation to cancel. Published terms usually say so outright, with cancellation needing 7 days' notice, or at least one clean's notice. Your terms should not treat the two animals the same.
Promise the year, not the date
This one is not a recovery, it is a change to what you sell. One firm's terms say dates may move for weather, staffing, holidays and demand, but the number of cleans in the year will match the pro-rata amount for the booked frequency. That sentence turns a lost week from a revenue problem into a scheduling one, which is much easier.
Assume the lost days before winter starts
A window cleaning winter schedule is just the version of your round that has the lost days already in it rather than hoping against them, and everything above belongs in it. Tell new customers at sign-up that dates move in bad weather and the annual count does not. Nobody minds being told in January. They mind being surprised in February.
Who has actually waited longest
The hard part is not the decision. It is knowing, on the Thursday, who is nine weeks overdue and who is a few days out, when half the round has moved and your sheet stopped being true on Monday. That is what RoundWiz is for: every customer with a real due date, sorted by who has waited longest, so a wash-out is a day you move rather than a week you lose track of.
£7.99 a month, or £79.90 for the year. Thirty days to try it, no card wanted, and your existing spreadsheet will import. Have a look at what it does, or start the trial and put a wet week through it.