Since I did the thorough cleaning earlier, I have done three or four smokes, and the glass was getting hard to see through again. So I got some cheap vodka and put some on a folded up half a paper towel, and gave it a going over. Then I got a fresh half a paper towel and did it again. That got it right off. The alcohol dissolves the smoke residue easily.
But it's kind of messy in a way because as the alcohol evaporates, it leaves the sticky smoke residue behind on your fingers and on the glass. Like using any solvent on a greasy substance, it just dilutes what you're trying to clean off, and then leaves a residue at that diluted concentration. So you need fresh bits of paper towel with fresh vodka on them until you get as much of the goo off as you want to bother getting.
It's like those "swiffer" cleaning mop things for your house. They're fine for grabbing large particles of dirt, or pet hair, etc. But for anything sticky or that dissolves in the water, or even makes a very fine suspension (like fine dirt that just makes mud), they just dilute it a bit and smear it around, leaving a thin film of whatever it was spread out more evenly on the floor.
The only way to clean up something soluble using a solvent (like using water on sugar) is to either flood the area and hose it away or use a REAL mop and mop bucket and use fresh water repeatedly until you reduce the concentration of the solute (mud, sugar, etc.) to the level where you're satisfied. Because, in the end, you're just diluting whatever it is and smearing it around at that lower concentration.
For nasty stuff, I use two mop buckets. One has the wringer in it and starts off empty, and the other one is just a bucket of fresh water to dip the mop in. That way, you're at least reducing the concentration of whatever it is more rapidly because the "fresh" water isn't being polluted by what you wring out of the mop. Some still gets transferred, but it cuts down the number of moppings required by a lot when you do it that way.
My wife makes wedding cakes. And when she mixes a large batch of frosting, powdered sugar gets everywhere. She was buying those "Swiffer Wet Jet" gadgets but was always disappointed that the floor just got universally sticky when she tried to clean up the sugar.
I showed her what was going on, and now she's a fan of the two bucket mopping (with a REAL mop) technique, too! :)
That's kind of how the vodka experiment went. Yes, it dissolves the smoke goo. But the best it can do is reduce the concentration of the goo and spread that around universally. Then you need a fresh chunk of paper towel and more vodka. Two or three goings-over are required to reduce the concentration to an acceptable degree.
I think the reason I preferred the TSP in water was that it emulsifies the greasy smoke residue, and then you can rinse that emulsified goo off with plain water from the garden hose. And that's not nearly as precious as the Vodka!
