Tip of The Day: Windows and Hard Water

Do you have hard water?  Maybe not even inside your house, but do you have it in your sprinklers?  Maybe you call it "secondary water", or maybe it's "irrigation water" where you live.

At any rate, if you have hard water, and you have windows, then by the end of the summer, your windows look like this:

Can you see that "frosted glass" section right in the middle?

What to do?  It seems like no amount of scrubbing or scraping really does anything.  I used to sit in my family room and stare at my window thinking, "Well, I guess it could be useful if the sprinklers hit my bathroom windows - then it might look kind of like frosted glass, and I wouldn't have to have curtains!"  Alas, it never worked that way.  And it would still be gross mineral deposits that I'd have to clean off, even if it were the bathroom windows anyway.

We had really hard water both inside and out, so I had all manner of cleaners designed to get that stuff off my sinks, faucets, and showers.  Wait a minute...

One day it hit me: the hard water deposit on the outside of my windows was exactly the same hard water deposit on the inside of my shower door.

I'm not going to claim that this is the only shower cleaner that will work,
it's just the one that I know and love.

So I grabbed my trusty shower cleaner, sprayed down my windows, waited ten minutes and then hosed it off.  Voila!  Clean windows!  I'm not so sure that this is actually recommended for your lawn, but even though I wasn't at all careful about how or where I was aiming that hose, my grass never seemed to suffer for it.  And if you're as sick of the yucky-frosted-window look as I was, you won't mind if it does.

Katie