A Helpful Tip If You Get Wood Treatment Spray On Glass

This is just a quick one, but if anyone out there in Hive-land finds it helpful, then I've done my job.

We have a log cabin in our garden, which I use as an office because I work from home. Every May as part of the maintenance routine, we spray the wood with a waterproofing wood treatment. It is basically linseed oil thinned down to allow it to be sprayed with one of those pump-up hand sprayers. It is a good thing I like the smell of linseed oil, because everything smells of it for a good week or two afterwards !

But the problem with spraying it is that it goes everywhere in a fine mist. The log cabin has two windows and a set of glazed double doors, and the mist of wood treatment inevitably gets onto the glass, no matter how well we mask it up. The glass ends up fogged up, a bit like the glass you find in bathroom windows.

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The fogged window - with birch seeds stuck to it as well !

But purely by chance, I have found a good way to easily clean the linseed oil off the glass. Carburettor cleaning spray.
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I have been working on the carburettors of the bike I am restoring, and happened to have a can of the stuff handy. It is designed to dissolve the "varnish" that can coat the inside of old carbs, so I thought I would give it a try just to see what would happen.

It turns out to work very well ! I think the carb spray is basically acetone plus a few other ingredients. I found that spraying a small section, giving it a couple of seconds to soak in, then rubbing it off with clean paper kitchen towel worked best. It even dissolved the residue from last year's wood treatment which I hadn't been able to get off.

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The cleaned window - even has reflections !

So if you end up with wood treatment on your windows, I definitely recommend giving this a try. But only on glass - if you use it on plastic windows, it would probably eat them !

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