a beautiful blue summer sky and a sponge
A beautiful blue summer sky …. and a sponge. (via Alan Cleaver)

Ah the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer….When the power grid can’t always keep up and we almost—almost!—wish for a return to winter. Still, there are a few things we’d like you to keep in mind during the summer:

Leave The AC On For Us, Please! It would help us greatly if you could either program your AC to come on when we’re there, or tell us how to manually over ride it for when we arrive. We do understand keeping the AC off during work hours to conserve energy and reduce bills. But we’re also guessing you’d be loudly unhappy if you went to work and found the HVAC off. We feel the same about working without air!

Hello? Anyone Home? We often arrive to find windows open in your homes during the summer. If you want them shut after we’re done, you do need to let us know. Otherwise we will assume that you left them open for fresh air.

Don’t Trip Tell us where the electrical panel is. Especially if you’re in an older home with window units. Those things tend to draw a lot of power, and there we are with our vacuums, potentially about to trip your circuit.

Lights Out You already know our policy about cleaning during an outage. We let very little stop us other than perhaps an actively unsafe transit or occupancy situation. So if we don’t hear from you in time about rescheduling, we’ll arrive and clean as planned. Because we can do a lot of things even without power—sweep, mop, dust, take out trash, clean bathrooms. (Unless of course your power also means you have no water. That’s a different story.)

Let us in, please?
Let us in, please? (image via osseous)

Let Us In! If you have an outage, and you use an alarm system, do check to make sure it didn’t erase our code! Newer systems tend to have battery back-ups, but the technology isn’t always perfect. If we can’t get in, we can’t clean.