Office, retail, restaurant, medical and multifamily exteriors inside the Brookhaven city limits, with wash water contained and the governing authority confirmed for the specific address
Thrare Contracting cleans exterior surfaces for commercial property owners, facility managers, general contractors and retail operators at addresses inside the City of Brookhaven: office buildings along Peachtree Road and at Perimeter Summit, retail and restaurant frontage at Town Brookhaven and on Dresden Drive, medical office space near Executive Park and North Druid Hills Road, hotels, and mid rise apartment and condominium stock. Brookhaven is a service area and not a location. Rare Earth Ltd, doing business as Thrare Contracting, works from Atlanta at the address printed at the foot of this page, and Rare Earth Ltd has operated since January 19, 2020.
The reason this page leads with jurisdiction rather than with equipment is that a Brookhaven address is not a DeKalb County address for stormwater purposes, and the difference decides whose ordinance a wash crew is working under. Most exterior cleaning quotes in metro Atlanta never name an ordinance at all. A quote that names the wrong one is worse than a quote that names none, because the property manager who checks it finds a vendor citing a government that does not enforce the rule on that parcel.
A Brookhaven address sits inside an incorporated city that operates its own stormwater program, so the City of Brookhaven ordinance is the local law a wash crew works under and the county program is not the document to read. The City of Brookhaven Department of Public Works states that "The City of Brookhaven implemented a stormwater utility in July 2013 and set up utility rates by Resolution RES 2013-06-06", and the same City page lists the stormwater ordinances as City Code Chapter 14, City Code Chapter 25 Article V, and City Code Chapter 25 Article VI.
DeKalb County publishes a separate program. The County's Stormwater Management page describes a utility "Established in 2004" and says DeKalb County "operates under NPDES Phase I MS4 permit". That county page does not state whether the county utility or the county MS4 reaches addresses inside an incorporated city such as Brookhaven, Chamblee, Doraville, Decatur or Dunwoody. Thrare Contracting does not fill that silence with an assumption. The governing authority for a specific parcel is confirmed before mobilization, and the confirmed answer is written into the quote alongside the containment method.
One practical consequence follows for a portfolio owner. A management company holding both a Brookhaven site and a site in unincorporated DeKalb is holding two properties under two governments, two ordinances and two enforcing departments, and a single vendor procedure written against the county alone leaves the city site uncovered.
The City of Brookhaven publishes a Pressure Washing Guidance page of its own, and that page states plainly: "Discharge of pressure washing washwater to the stormwater drainage system is prohibited." Very few municipalities in metro Atlanta publish a page dedicated to this single activity, and Brookhaven names the activity by name in its illicit discharge examples, listing "Power Washing Washwater" beside paint, auto fluids, sewage spills and construction sediment.
The City also records why the rule is enforced rather than merely written: "Pressure washing activities in Brookhaven have resulted in fish kills along entire reaches of streams." The City describes the receiving system broadly, stating that "The stormwater drainage system includes, but is not limited to, stormwater catch basins/drains, yard inlets, roadway gutters, ditches, and ponds", and adding that "Roof gutters may also drain to storm drains and roadway gutters." A curb gutter counts. A yard inlet behind a dumpster enclosure counts.
The City of Brookhaven lists six legal authorities behind the prohibition on that one page:
The City quotes its own Section 25-648 in full on the same page: "It is unlawful for any person to discharge or to cause, permit, or suffer to be discharged any pollutants or any water or stormwater containing any pollutants to any component of the city MS4. Such discharge shall be deemed an illicit discharge and constitutes a violation of the provisions of this article." Note the reach of that sentence. Section 25-648 binds "any person", which covers the contractor holding the wand and the property owner who hired the contractor.
On penalties, this page quotes the City and nothing else. The City of Brookhaven Pressure Washing Guidance page states that "Maximum penalties for discharging pressure washing washwater to the stormwater drainage system or to local waterways are not to exceed $1,000 fine per violation per day and up to six months in jail." That figure is the City's published maximum, attributed to the City. Thrare Contracting publishes no other penalty number on this page. The large per-day Clean Water Act penalty figures circulated across the pressure washing trade web trace to secondary blogs rather than to the statute, and Clean Water Act civil penalties are set by statute, adjusted for inflation, and dependent on the enforcement route. A scare figure a buyer can disprove destroys the credibility of every accurate sentence around it, so this page cites the rule and the City of Brookhaven published maximum and stops there.
The City of Brookhaven prints pollution prevention steps on the same guidance page, and Thrare Contracting works to them. Quoted as the City states them:
Two of those steps carry commercial consequences worth stating out loud. The dry weather instruction removes rain days from the schedule, so a Brookhaven wash date is a weather-dependent date and the reschedule rule belongs in the contract rather than in a phone call. The low volume nozzle instruction reduces the recovered volume, which reduces vacuum truck trips, which is the single largest variable cost on a contained wash.
A Brookhaven commercial scope is written as named surfaces with a method and a frequency against each, never as a service list. Thrare Contracting quotes these sub-scopes:
Sequence is the part of exterior cleaning a buyer cannot verify from a photograph, so Thrare Contracting publishes it. The order on an occupied Brookhaven site runs:
Thrare Contracting publishes the price boundary rather than discovering it during the job. Included in a quoted commercial wash on a Brookhaven property:
Not included, and quoted separately when the site needs them:
Thrare Contracting does not publish unit rates on this page. A wash on a shaded north elevation with heavy organic growth and a wash on an open south elevation are different jobs at the same square footage, and a rate published without the surface condition behind it misleads the buyer who relies on it.
Brookhaven's storm sewer runs under General NPDES Stormwater Permit No. GAG610000, which the City of Brookhaven names on its own illicit discharge and pressure washing pages as the permit behind the local prohibition. The Georgia Environmental Protection Division states that "GA EPD has issued Phase I permit requirements that apply to Large and Medium MS4s and Phase II permit requirements that apply to Small MS4s", and GAG610000 is the Phase II general permit for small MS4s, reissued November 21, 2022 with an effective date of December 6, 2022. Georgia's Phase I large MS4 permits carry the separate numbers GAS000100 through GAS000144, reissued June 5, 2024.
DeKalb County describes itself differently. The County's Stormwater Management page says DeKalb County "operates under NPDES Phase I MS4 permit". A Brookhaven city address and an unincorporated DeKalb address therefore sit under two different permit classes administered by two different governments.
The distinction changes almost nothing about whether wash water is allowed into a storm drain, because Phase I and Phase II both prohibit illicit discharges. The distinction changes who writes the ordinance, who inspects, and which phone number reports a problem. For Brookhaven that number is City of Brookhaven Public Works at 404-637-0524, printed on the City's own illicit discharge page alongside its Brookhaven Connect service request path.
The City also documents that the program is active rather than nominal. The City of Brookhaven 2026 Proposed Budget records that "All MS4 Inspections were completed, and the Illicit Discharge Detection and Elimination Program identified and eliminated several discharges, mainly from broken sanitary mains", that the department "entered the second year of its third five-year NPDES Stormwater MS4 Permit and Inspection cycle", and that "100 miles of streets were swept, far exceeding the 10-mile permit requirement." The City's program page adds that "Every 5 years, 100% of the MS4 is inspected by City personnel and its consultants", one of five inspection zones each year.
A Brookhaven commercial property is billed one Equivalent Residential Unit for each 2,500 square feet of impervious area, and the City of Brookhaven states that basis in its own budget: "Non-residential properties are assessed at one (1) ERU for each 2,500 square feet of impervious area." The same budget states that "The Stormwater Utility Fee for 2024 was assessed at a rate of $11.83 per month ($142.00 per year) per Equivalent Residential Unit (ERU)", and that the fee "is billed and collected through the annual property tax bill". Multifamily properties and condominiums are assessed at 0.75 ERU per unit, single family homes and townhomes at 1 ERU per parcel, and vacant lots at 0.5 ERU per parcel.
The City records how that rate was built. The 2026 Proposed Budget states that "the City Council increased the Stormwater Fee to $112 / ERU for ongoing operations and added an additional $30 / ERU to service an anticipated Stormwater Fund Revenue Bond", and adds that the bond "was not approved in 2024". Both figures are the City's own, quoted with the year the City attached to them rather than presented as a current rate.
The contrast with the county is the reason this section exists. DeKalb County publishes a base rate of "$120 per Equivalent Residential Unit (ERU) annually" under a heading labeled Current Rates (Effective 2025), calculates "Commercial/Other Developed Land: 1 ERU per 3,000 sq ft of impervious surface", and assesses multifamily at "0.5 ERU x number of units".
| Billing basis | City of Brookhaven, as the City publishes it | DeKalb County, as the County publishes it |
|---|---|---|
| Rate per ERU | $142.00 per year, labeled the 2024 rate | $120 per year, labeled Current Rates (Effective 2025) |
| Commercial impervious area per ERU | 2,500 square feet | 3,000 square feet |
| Multifamily | 0.75 ERU per unit | 0.5 ERU per unit |
| MS4 permit class | Phase II, General Permit No. GAG610000 | Phase I |
Two cautions belong with that table. First, both sets of figures carry the year label the publishing government attached to them, and neither government has been read as stating a 2026 rate. Second, and more important on a cleaning page, an ERU charge is a fee rule and not a discharge rule. Paying a stormwater utility bill authorizes no discharge whatever, so a property owner who is billed for 40 ERU is under exactly the same Section 25-648 prohibition as one billed for one.
The impervious-area basis does carry one useful implication for a facility manager. Because the bill is calculated on impervious area, a Brookhaven site already knows roughly how much hard surface it owns, and that number is the fastest sanity check on an exterior cleaning quote whose square footage looks wrong.
Exterior cleaning on a Brookhaven property is scheduled inside the City's published construction window as a conservative default, and confirmed with the City or the property before any work is set outside it. The City of Brookhaven guide "Noise and Other Nuisances" states that "Construction or demolition for projects with approved permits is allowed during the following hours: Monday through Friday 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; None on Sunday or city holidays."
Here is the honest limit on that quotation, and this page states it rather than smoothing it. The City scoped that window to "Construction or demolition for projects with approved permits". Exterior cleaning is neither construction nor demolition and normally carries no building permit, so the published hours are not established to govern a wash crew. Thrare Contracting has not found a published City of Brookhaven rule stating the permitted hours for exterior cleaning specifically, and says so instead of implying one exists. The City does publish a route for scheduled work outside the window: the City's Planning and Zoning answers state that an applicant "can apply for a noise variance that is reviewed by staff" and that "There is no fee for the noise variance request."
For a restaurant patio at Town Brookhaven or a grocery-anchored center on Dresden Drive, the practical schedule that results is a customer-facing zone cleaned before opening and a back-of-house zone cleaned during the day. Where a scope genuinely requires overnight work, the hours question is settled in writing with the property and the City before the crew is dispatched, not on the night.
Stucco and synthetic stucco fail well below the pressure a concrete surface tolerates, which matters in Brookhaven because much of the city's mid rise mixed-use and garden apartment stock is finished in EIFS or acrylic stucco. Sto Corp., an EIFS manufacturer headquartered in Atlanta, instructs in its StoTherm repair and maintenance guide: "If a pressure washer is used, keep the pressure at approximately 200-500 psi (1.4-3.4 MPa), and keep the nozzle several feet from the surface. Do not exceed 500 psi (1.4 MPa) pressure, as the EIFS surface integrity can be destroyed with higher pressure washing." Sto's list of prohibited methods adds steam cleaning, noting that the expanded polystyrene insulation board in an EIFS assembly "has a service temperature limit of about 165 deg F (74 deg C)".
Sika Corporation's Senergy technical bulletin sets the same ceiling and adds a standoff: "Never use water pressure more than 500 psi or allow pressure nozzles to come within 2 feet of the wall. Excessive pressure may damage textured finishes and EIFS lamina. Use fan type tips (30-45 deg or greater) on the pressure washer." The same bulletin states the principle a commercial buyer should hold a vendor to: "The chemicals provide the cleaning, not the water pressure."
Both documents are manufacturer literature for the manufacturer's own products rather than a building code, and neither reaches brick, fiber cement, poured concrete or metal panel. A Brookhaven elevation in brick or fiber cement is governed by different limits from different publishers, and those limits are set out on the building washing page rather than restated here. Both EIFS documents also close on runoff, with Sto directing the reader to "Always check local regulatory requirements for disposal of cleaning solution and waste water", which on a Brookhaven parcel means Section 25-648.
Thrare Contracting prices adjacent scopes on the same trip because a second mobilization to the same Brookhaven address is a cost the property pays twice. Common pairings are parking lot and deck cleaning, gutter clearing before the wash so roof leaders are not discharging debris across a cleaned elevation, apartment community exteriors, and grounds maintenance. Program structure, vendor onboarding and portfolio-level scheduling are set out on the commercial property management page and the commercial services page, which carry the company-wide policy this page deliberately does not restate.
Rare Earth Ltd holds DBE, ACDBE and MBE certification, qualifies as a small disadvantaged business, uses E-Verify, and is registered in SAM under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 and CAGE 9JAV8. Rare Earth Ltd does not hold HUBZone, 8(a) or SOC 2 status. Those registrations are set out with their issuers on the credentials and compliance page.
Thrare Contracting is based in Atlanta and serves Brookhaven as a service area. Rare Earth Ltd, trading as Thrare Contracting, works across Brookhaven and the northern DeKalb County submarkets, and the company address is 8735 Dunwoody Pl, Ste R, Atlanta, GA 30350.
The City of Brookhaven operates its own stormwater utility and its own illicit discharge ordinance, so a Brookhaven address is governed by City Code Section 25-648 rather than by county guidance. DeKalb County's own Stormwater Management page does not state whether the county utility reaches addresses inside an incorporated city, so Thrare Contracting confirms the governing authority for the specific parcel before mobilizing and writes the answer into the quote.
Wash water is contained on the property and kept out of the storm drainage system. The City of Brookhaven states that "Discharge of pressure washing washwater to the stormwater drainage system is prohibited", and the City's own guidance directs a contractor to place temporary barriers around inlets, divert washwater to vegetated or pervious areas for infiltration, and collect it for disposal by wet or dry vacuum where no pervious area is available. The method chosen for a site is named in the quote.
The City of Brookhaven Pressure Washing Guidance page states that "Maximum penalties for discharging pressure washing washwater to the stormwater drainage system or to local waterways are not to exceed $1,000 fine per violation per day and up to six months in jail." That maximum is the City of Brookhaven published figure and attaches to the City ordinance rather than to the federal Clean Water Act. Thrare Contracting quotes no federal per-day penalty number, because the figures circulated on pressure washing trade sites trace to secondary blogs rather than to the statute.
Sto Corp. instructs that a pressure washer used on EIFS should run at "approximately 200-500 psi" and states "Do not exceed 500 psi (1.4 MPa) pressure, as the EIFS surface integrity can be destroyed with higher pressure washing." Sika Corporation's Senergy bulletin sets the same 500 psi ceiling, requires a 2 foot standoff and fan tips of 30 to 45 degrees or greater, and states that "The chemicals provide the cleaning, not the water pressure." Both are manufacturer instructions for their own products and neither reaches brick, fiber cement or concrete.
The City of Brookhaven publishes permitted hours of Monday through Friday 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with none on Sunday or city holidays, and the City scopes that window to "Construction or demolition for projects with approved permits". Exterior cleaning is neither construction nor demolition, so Thrare Contracting treats the window as the conservative default and confirms hours with the City or the property before scheduling work outside it. The City offers a staff-reviewed noise variance with no fee for the request.
Send the address, the business hours by tenant, the approximate square footage by surface type, and any known drainage constraint. Serving Brookhaven, northern DeKalb County and metro Atlanta from Atlanta.