Eric Serani, co-owner of FlyteCo Brewing, watches a large drone, dangling a hose, roar 164 feet in the air, along the side of the last air traffic control tower from the old Stapleton Airport in Denver’s Central Park neighborhood.
This cleaning is blasting away layers of historic dirt. This is the first time, Serani believes, the exterior of the windows of the tower have been washed since the airport shut down in 1995.
In the years since, the old runways have been converted into a mixed-use neighborhood, with dense suburban-style housing, grocery stores, restaurants and more. Before the pandemic, the flight tower sat empty for decades. Then it was briefly a Punch Bowl Social and more recently Serani and his business partner opened a brewery and family-fun center FlyteCo Brewing.
When Serani took over, he did attempt to clean a few of the windows, all angled at 45 degrees.
“When you're standing up there, you're leaning back over the back of the railing of the catwalk with a squeegee,” Serani said. “It's just really awkward.”
He’s relieved to have a safe and affordable solution for his company.
As the drone reaches the lookout deck, water blasts the windows, misting down on Serani and the team from Drone Wash.
The company Drone Wash, founded by husband-wife duo Jay and Nicole Hanna, is what they believe is the first of its kind in Colorado.
A few years back, Jay Hanna, an entrepreneur at heart with a background in marketing, started playing with drones as a hobby. He’s proud to be a quick learner and was a natural with drone photography.
“People were just impressed with the footage that I was capturing and said they told me I should start a business,” he said.
So two years ago, he did what a lot of drone entrepreneurs have done: founded Jeeves Drones, a company that shoots photographs for real estate companies and roof inspectors and also does some 3D mapping.
So far, that company has been having a lot of success. But he wanted to find other ways to put drones to work.
“We are very, very passionate about drones,” he said. “We’re constantly looking for ways to use drones that are useful beyond creatives.
Within the past year, the Hannas learned about companies in other states using drones to wash windows. They reached out to learn more.
“We trained with a company that's been doing drone cleaning for two years out in Florida,” Jay said. “And we're bringing it to Colorado.”
He asked the leaders of his church, New Hope, in Thornton, if he could test out his business idea on the two-story church’s windows, and they said yes. For the past few months, he’s been perfecting his craft there.
“We did a little job on the Denver Convention Center,” he said. “We're hoping to get the whole Denver Convention Center.”
FlyteCo is his business’s third building to clean, and he’s doing a media blitz next Monday, what he’s calling his company’s grand opening.
Drone Wash is still perfecting its process.
The company can fly the drones up to 200 feet, but beyond that, the hose gets too heavy. It works for buildings up to 20 stories tall.
The company typically runs a crew of three and has five part-time employees. Jay focuses on the cleaning, Ray Jeans works as the pilot, and a third person on site monitors the drone. Nicole works in operations, administration and payroll.
“We hook a pressure washing hose up to the drone,” Jay explained. “The drone takes the hose up and has a nozzle on it, like a standard pressure washing nozzle. We have pumps on the ground and a trailer with water and cleaning solutions that mixes them together, sends it up to the drone, and the drone applies it.
“We let the cleaning solution do its work on the dirt and break it up, and then we come back with filtered water, deionized water, to rinse it off,” he continued. “The water air dries and leaves a streak-free finish.”
The whole thing feels very sci-fi, and it’s only natural to worry about the fate of professional window washers and whether machines could take their jobs.
The Hannas business plan for Drone Wash takes that fear into account.
“It's a love-hate relationship with other window cleaners,” Jay said. “A lot of people look at this as kind of a fad or a gimmick, but there's room for this type of technology. And there's room for this type of cleaning. So we are working with window cleaning companies and allowing them to offer drone cleaning without having to become drone experts.”
Jay acknowledges that while drone cleaning does a good job getting to hard-to-reach places, a human being can do a finer-touch job and competitors are quick to point that out.
“To me that's comparing somebody cleaning your car and detailing it with Q-tips to going through a touchless car wash," Jay said. "They each have their place, and they have their purpose. We're the touchless car wash solution. We're faster, it's more affordable, and there's no humans involved.”
