This page is the reference page for Thrare Contracting's commercial gutter cleaning across metro Atlanta. Scope, job sequence, the price boundary, credentials and the federal and state stormwater rules are stated here once, and the eight city pages link back to these sections rather than restating them. The City of Atlanta material specific to an address inside the corporate limits sits further down.
Thrare Contracting cleans gutters for commercial and institutional property owners: multifamily communities, homeowner and condominium associations and the management companies that run them, office and retail properties, and government and institutional facilities. Multifamily and community association portfolios are the strongest fit, because one mobilization covers many buildings, the scope repeats on a schedule the property already budgets, and the buyer is a manager who needs documentation rather than reassurance.
Community association work is a large part of the metro market rather than a niche. The Foundation for Community Association Research estimates Georgia holds 11,400 community associations covering roughly 889,000 housing units and 2,326,000 residents, and reports that 30 to 40 percent of associations nationally are self-managed, meaning they handle specific projects without a professional manager on staff (Foundation for Community Association Research, 2025 U.S. National and State Statistical Review, published March 2025, read 2026-09-02). A self-managed board buys differently from a regional asset manager: the board needs the scope written so a volunteer can check it, and the asset manager needs a report that drops into a file.
Thrare Contracting does not sell residential gutter cleaning. Gutter cleaning is not offered to single family homeowners as a standalone service anywhere in the metro. A single family owner looking for gutter work is better served by a residential specialist, and stating that plainly here saves both sides a phone call.
Three checks cost a manager nothing and catch most of what goes wrong on an occupied property. First, ask how each roof plane will be reached, and get the answer in the scope of work rather than in conversation. Second, ask for the certificate of insurance with the property named the way the management system requires, before mobilization rather than after. Third, ask whether the contractor carries workers compensation coverage, because the Georgia State Board of Workers' Compensation states that "Every employer, individual, firm, association, or corporation, regularly employing three or more persons, part-time or full time, shall provide workers' compensation insurance coverage," and adds that "Exempted officers of corporations or exempted members of limited liability companies shall not reduce the number of employees for this purpose" (Georgia State Board of Workers' Compensation, Employer Information, read 2026-09-02). A contractor who cannot produce those three answers in writing is a contractor whose incident becomes the property's incident.
A commercial gutter cleaning covers the whole drainage path from roof edge to discharge point, not the visible trough alone. The trough is the part a manager can see from the parking lot, and it is rarely the part that fails. A blocked elbow, a collapsed buried connection or a downspout discharging against a footing produces the water intrusion call, and none of those are visible from the ground.
Two items sit deliberately outside that list and are named here so a manager can spot them in a competing bid. Gutter cleaning does not include repair, and a cleaning crew that reports a failed hanger has done the job correctly by reporting it rather than by field fixing it. Gutter cleaning also does not include roof work, so a crew that finds lifted shingles or a failed pipe boot writes it into the punch list and leaves the roof to a roofer.
Gutter work on an occupied property is sequenced building by building, so no parking bay, walkway or amenity is out of service for longer than that one building takes. A community with 12 buildings is not a single job site closed for a week; it is 12 short job sites in a row, and the difference is entirely in the sequencing.
Two sequencing decisions are worth stating because they are where an occupied property gets disrupted. Debris comes down before water goes in, because reversing that order turns dry debris into a slurry that has to be handled twice. And the drop zone is cleared building by building rather than at the end of the day, because a cone line left standing across a resident parking bay after the crew has moved on is the complaint a manager actually receives.
Six items produce a firm quote and a first visit that does not stall at the gate.
The last item earns its place on this list. A property that already knows one building floods a breezeway in a hard rain has handed the crew the most valuable diagnostic on the site, and withholding it until the walkthrough costs a return visit.
A commercial gutter cleaning quote is priced on five inputs: linear footage of gutter, number of stories, access method, debris load and visit frequency. The quote names all five, so a manager can check the arithmetic against the next bid instead of comparing two lump sums that describe different work.
Why the exclusions are stated rather than buried: a cleaning bid that silently includes repair is a bid that has to be revised the first time a hanger pulls out of fascia, and a manager who approved the low number is the one who has to explain the revision. Naming the boundary at bid time is the cheaper conversation.
Thrare Contracting does not publish gutter cleaning prices. Linear footage, story count and access method vary so widely across a metro portfolio that a published number would be wrong for most properties in both directions, and a manager comparing a published number against a real bid learns nothing useful.
Two visits a year is the base cycle for a metro Atlanta multifamily community, one after the November hardwood leaf drop and one after spring pollen and seed drop. Properties under heavy pine, or with buildings tight to a wooded buffer, earn three or four visits.
Metro Atlanta portfolios rarely sit in one debris environment. A single management company runs communities under mature water oak and willow oak inside the Perimeter, properties under loblolly pine to the east and south, and newer assets on cleared sites to the north where the canopy is still young. Those three conditions do not share a cleaning interval, and a portfolio priced on one flat cycle overserves the newest properties and underserves the oldest.
Thrare Contracting therefore sets the interval per property rather than per contract. An asset under heavy pine sheds needles in every month of the year; an open site with young hardwoods holds up on two visits. The condition report from each visit is what moves a property between those tiers, so the schedule is corrected by evidence from the roof rather than by a renewal conversation.
A gutter is engineered against a rainfall intensity, not against an annual rainfall total, and the distinction is the whole reason a partly blocked gutter passes an ordinary week and fails in a storm.
The Georgia Department of Community Affairs lists the "International Plumbing Code, 2024 Edition, with Georgia Amendments" among the current mandatory state minimum standard codes for construction adopted by the Board of Community Affairs (Georgia DCA, Current State Minimum Codes for Construction, read 2026-09-02). In that code, section 1106.1 states that "The size of the vertical conductors and leaders, building storm drains, building storm sewers and any horizontal branches of such drains or sewers shall be based on the 100-year hourly rainfall rate indicated in Figures 1106.1(1) through 1106.1(5) or on other rainfall rates determined from approved local weather data" (International Code Council, 2024 International Plumbing Code, chapter 11, read 2026-09-02).
Section 1106.6 governs the trough itself: "Horizontal gutters shall be sized based on the flow rate from the roof surface. The flow rate in horizontal gutters shall not exceed that specified in Table 1106.6." Table 1106.6 gives the rated capacity of a clear gutter at a given slope. At a slope of one eighth inch per foot, the table lists 39 gallons per minute for a 4 inch gutter, 74 gallons per minute for a 5 inch gutter, and 110 gallons per minute for a 6 inch gutter. Footnote a to the table states: "Dimensions are width by depth for rectangular shapes. Single dimensions are diameters of a semicircle."
Read those two provisions together and the maintenance argument makes itself. Every figure in Table 1106.6 describes an open cross section. Packed leaf litter, needles and shingle granules occupy that cross section, so a 5 inch trough carrying two inches of compacted debris is no longer the 5 inch trough the table rated, and the storm it was sized for has not gotten any smaller. Capacity does not fall in a straight line with debris depth, so no honest contractor will hand a manager a derated number; the point is that the design margin is gone and nobody measured its going.
Rainfall volume gives the same answer from the other direction. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration puts the twelve 1991 to 2020 monthly precipitation normals for Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport at a summed 50.43 inches, against the separately published annual normal of 49.71 inches for the same station (NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, U.S. Monthly Climate Normals 1991-2020, station USW00013874, read 2026-08-31). One inch of rain on one square foot of roof is 0.623 gallons, so every 1,000 square feet of roof plane sheds roughly 31,400 gallons in a normal year, and all of it is meant to reach a downspout. A 12 building community with 8,000 square feet of roof per building moves on the order of 3 million gallons a year through gutters that cost a fraction of one building's roof to maintain.
The code also names where that water is allowed to end up. Section 1101.2 states that "Rainwater from roofs and storm water from paved areas, yards, courts and courtyards shall drain to an approved place of disposal," and section 1101.3 states that "Storm water shall not be drained into sewers intended for sewage only." A downspout rerouted into a sanitary cleanout by a previous contractor is a code problem, not a housekeeping problem, and the flushing step is where it gets found.
Gutter debris leaves the property in bags, and gutter rinse water stays on the property. Neither one goes into a storm drain. A storm drain on a metro Atlanta street is not connected to a treatment plant, and the rule governing what may enter it is federal.
Under 40 CFR 122.26(b)(2), an illicit discharge is "any discharge to a municipal separate storm sewer that is not composed entirely of storm water except discharges pursuant to a NPDES permit (other than the NPDES permit for discharges from the municipal separate storm sewer) and discharges resulting from fire fighting activities" (read 2026-08-31). The same rule, at 40 CFR 122.26(d)(2)(iv)(B), requires a permitted storm sewer operator to run "a program, including a schedule, to detect and remove (or require the discharger to the municipal separate storm sewer to obtain a separate NPDES permit for) illicit discharges and improper disposal into the storm sewer." That second clause is why a city has an inspector at all.
The Environmental Protection Agency states that "The NPDES stormwater program regulates some stormwater discharges from three potential sources: municipal separate storm sewer systems (MS4s), construction activities, and industrial activities" (EPA, NPDES Stormwater Program, page last updated May 4, 2026, read 2026-08-31). A commercial site's street drainage network is one of those MS4s. In Georgia the NPDES stormwater program is administered by the Environmental Protection Division's Watershed Protection Branch (Georgia EPD, Stormwater, read 2026-08-31).
Apply that to the two waste streams a gutter cleaning actually produces. Bagged leaf litter and sediment are solids, and a catch basin is the single easiest place on a property to make them disappear, which is exactly why local codes name yard waste in their pollutant lists. Rinse water off a gutter face carries sediment, organic matter and whatever cleaner was applied, so rinse water is not composed entirely of storm water, and no apartment community holds an NPDES permit for washing a gutter. The compliance path is containment: keep the rinse water on the property and release it across a vegetated area where soil does the filtering.
One thing this page will not tell a reader is what a violation costs. Clean Water Act civil penalties are statutory, adjusted for inflation, and dependent on the enforcement route taken, and the round per day figure repeated across the trade web traces to secondary blogs rather than to the statute. Cite the rule, and treat any contractor quoting a penalty number without a statutory citation as a contractor guessing.
The federal rule above is the same at every address in the metro. The local ordinance enforcing it is not, and the most common error in exterior services marketing is attributing a county rule to a city address.
County illicit discharge ordinances in Georgia are routinely scoped to the unincorporated area, because a county storm sewer system is defined as what the county owns or maintains. Fulton County states the boundary in its own words: "The purpose of the Stormwater Management Program is to manage the surface water resources of unincorporated Fulton County, including administration, maintenance, operations, regulation, and enforcement. For all other areas of the County, stormwater management is the responsibility of the individual cities." (Fulton County Government, Stormwater Services, read 2026-09-02).
The practical instruction to a property manager does not change across those boundaries: contain the water, bag the debris, and keep both out of the drain. The authority behind the instruction does change, and so does the phone number that answers a complaint. Each city page in this family carries its own city ordinance rather than borrowing a county document, and a claim on any of those pages that a county rule governs an incorporated address should be treated as an error and reported.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration sets two different height thresholds, and which one applies depends on whether the work is classed as general industry or as construction.
For general industry, 29 CFR 1910.28(b)(1)(i) states: "Except as provided elsewhere in this section, the employer must ensure that each employee on a walking-working surface with an unprotected side or edge that is 4 feet (1.2 m) or more above a lower level is protected from falling by one or more of the following:" guardrail systems, safety net systems, or personal fall protection systems (OSHA, read 2026-08-31).
For construction work, the threshold is higher. 29 CFR 1926.501(b)(1) states: "Each employee on a walking/working surface (horizontal and vertical surface) with an unprotected side or edge which is 6 feet (1.8 m) or more above a lower level shall be protected from falling by the use of guardrail systems, safety net systems, or personal fall arrest systems" (OSHA, read 2026-08-31).
One exclusion catches buyers out. 29 CFR 1910.28, paragraph (a)(2)(i), states that the section does not apply "To portable ladders", so the 4 foot rule does not answer the question a manager actually cares about on a two story walk up, where most of the exposure sits on a ladder rather than on a roof edge. A manager comparing gutter bids should ask how the vendor reaches each roof plane, building by building, and not only whether the vendor owns harnesses.
Why a property manager should care about a rule addressed to employers: a fall on the property becomes the property's problem long before fault is settled, through the incident report, the carrier notification and the resident or tenant conversation that follows. Access method belongs in the scope of work, in writing, at bid time.
Rare Earth Ltd, doing business as Thrare Contracting, holds Disadvantaged Business Enterprise and Airport Concession Disadvantaged Business Enterprise certification, holds Minority Business Enterprise certification, qualifies as a small disadvantaged business, is registered in the federal System for Award Management under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 and CAGE code 9JAV8, and is enrolled in E-Verify. Those registrations are what a public agency buyer or a corporate supplier diversity program asks for at vendor setup, and each one is verifiable from a public record without calling us.
Rare Earth Ltd does not hold HUBZone certification, does not hold 8(a) Business Development program certification, and does not hold SOC 2 attestation, and does not represent otherwise on any page, in any bid, or in any capability statement. A buyer who needs one of those three should say so early, because the answer will not change during a procurement.
Rare Earth Ltd operates from 8735 Dunwoody Pl, Ste R, Atlanta, GA 30350. Every city named in this page family is a service area reached from that address, not a second location, and no page on this site claims otherwise.
What none of that tells a buyer is whether the crew shows up. Certifications answer whether a firm can be set up as a vendor and counted toward a participation goal; the per building condition report is what answers whether the work happened, which is why the report is in the base price rather than sold as an add on.
The City of Atlanta operates its own municipal separate storm sewer system and enforces its own illicit discharge ordinance, so a property inside the corporate limits is governed by city code rather than by a county document.
The ordinance lives in the Atlanta City Code, Part II, Chapter 74 (Environment), Article IX (Illicit Discharge and Illegal Connections), enacted by Ordinance No. 2003-75, section 3, on 6-24-03. Section 74-429 fixes its reach: "The provisions of this article shall apply throughout the corporate limits of the City of Atlanta." Section 74-428 defines the system the article protects as any stormwater collection or conveyance facility that is "(1) Owned or maintained by the City of Atlanta; and (2) Not part of a publicly-owned treatment works," and defines an illicit discharge as "any direct or indirect non-stormwater discharge to the storm sewer system of the city, except as exempted in section 74-437 of this article" (read 2026-09-02).
Section 74-436 states the prohibition in one sentence: "No person shall throw, drain, or otherwise discharge, cause, or allow others under its control to throw, drain, or otherwise discharge into the storm sewer system of the City of Atlanta any pollutants or waters containing any pollutants, other than stormwater."
Atlanta's own pollutant list answers that directly, and it is the reason this section exists on a gutter cleaning page rather than only on a pressure washing page. Section 74-428 defines a pollutant as "anything which causes or contributes to pollution," then lists examples including "non-hazardous liquid and solid wastes and yard wastes; refuse, rubbish, garbage, litter, or other discarded or abandoned objects and accumulations, so that same may cause or contribute to pollution" and, separately, "detergents (biodegradable or otherwise); degreasers; cleaning chemicals." Leaf litter and seed pods swept off a roof are yard waste by any reading, so pushing a gutter's contents into a catch basin is not a shortcut, it is the prohibited act described in section 74-436.
Section 74-437 lists what is exempt, and the list is worth reading because of what is absent from it: potable water line flushing by a government agency, other potable water sources, landscape irrigation or lawn watering, diverted stream flows, rising ground water, ground water infiltration to storm drains, uncontaminated pumped ground water, foundation or footing drains, crawl space pumps, air conditioning condensation, springs, natural riparian habitat or wetland flows, any other water source not containing pollutants, and firefighting. Neither gutter debris nor exterior rinse water appears among the exemptions. Atlanta's definition of an illegal connection names wash water expressly, covering any conveyance that allows "any non-stormwater discharge including sewage, process wastewater, and wash water to enter the storm drain system."
Enforcement is not theoretical. Section 74-431 assigns administration and enforcement to the police and to the commissioner of the Department of Watershed Management or a designee, and the department states that "The City has a robust Illicit Discharge Detection and Elimination (IDDE) Program that investigates the source of water quality complaints reported to Department of Watershed Management" (City of Atlanta Department of Watershed Management, Stormwater Management, read 2026-09-02). The same department describes the program's purpose as working "toward elimination of illicit discharges and reduction of pollutants entering the Chattahoochee and Ocmulgee River Basins through the City's stormwater infrastructure, as well as to address flooding." Two river basins in one city is unusual, and it means a catch basin on one side of an Atlanta property and one on the other can send water to different rivers.
Atlanta regulates the leaf blower separately from the rest of the job, and the leaf blower is the loudest tool on a gutter crew. Chapter 74, Article IV of the Atlanta City Code is titled the "Atlanta Noise Ordinance." Section 74-133 reads, quoted as the code prints it including a missing preposition before the first list of districts: "It is unlawful for any person to use or operate any noise-generating, motorized landscape maintenance devices, including but not limited to leaf blowers, lawn mowers, or chainsaws, any single-family residential, two-family residential, multi-family residential, or mixed-use zoning district or in areas within 300 feet of any single-family residential, two-family residential, multi-family residential, or mixed-use zoning district from 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m." (Ordinance No. 2017-59(17-O-1555), section 2, 10-16-17; Ordinance No. 2018-34(18-O-1414), section 1, 8-29-18; read 2026-09-02).
Construction noise gets a different clock. Section 74-134(a) prohibits construction noise plainly audible more than 100 feet beyond the property boundary inside a residential zoning district between 8:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. on a weekday, and between 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. on a weekend day or legal holiday, and then states that "between the hours of 7:00 a.m. (or 9:00 a.m. on a weekend day or legal holiday) and 7:00 p.m., the prohibitions of this article shall not apply to construction noise."
Read together, the two sections put the earliest practical start for the noisy half of a gutter visit at 8:00 a.m. on a residential or mixed-use Atlanta property, an hour later than the construction-noise window opens on a weekday. State the limit carefully, though: section 74-132 lists exclusions from the article, and exclusion (j) covers "Noises and/or sounds caused to be made by manufacturing, governmental, or commercial entities in the normal course of their business," while section 74-136 reinstates only the section 74-131 distance limits against commercial entities near residential districts and does not name section 74-133. Whether a commercial landscape crew can claim exclusion (j) against section 74-133 is a question for the city, not for a contractor's website. Thrare Contracting schedules blower work after 8:00 a.m. next to occupied residential buildings in Atlanta regardless of how that question resolves, because a 6:00 a.m. blower under a bedroom window is a complaint the property receives whether or not it is a citation.
One consequence for scheduling is worth naming for an Atlanta asset manager: hand debris removal, bagging, downspout flushing and photography are all quiet work and can start earlier in the morning than the blower can. A crew that sequences the quiet work first gets a full day out of an 8:00 a.m. noise start rather than losing the first hour.
Eight cities carry a page of their own, and each of those pages links back to the policy sections above rather than restating them. What each city page adds is the material that is genuinely local to that address: the city's own illicit discharge ordinance, the city's noise and working hours rules, the nearest long-record rainfall station, and the debris environment that sets the interval there.
Gutter cleaning is cheapest to buy when it shares a mobilization with the exterior work a property was already scheduling, because the setup, the access arrangements and the resident notice are paid for once.
Thrare Contracting does not clean gutters for single family homeowners. Gutter cleaning is sold to multifamily communities, homeowner and condominium associations and their management companies, commercial properties, and government and institutional facilities. Residential gutter cleaning is not offered as a standalone service anywhere in the metro.
Scope, job sequence, the price boundary, credentials and the federal stormwater rules are identical at every address in metro Atlanta, so restating them on nine pages would produce nine near-identical pages and give a search engine no reason to prefer any of them. The policy sits on this page under stable anchors, and each city page links to it and spends its own words on what is genuinely local to that city.
Table 1106.6 of the 2024 International Plumbing Code, adopted by Georgia as a mandatory state minimum standard code, rates a clear 6 inch semicircular gutter at 110 gallons per minute at a slope of one eighth inch per foot, a 5 inch gutter at 74 gallons per minute, and a 4 inch gutter at 39 gallons per minute. Section 1106.1 sizes the rest of the system against a 100-year hourly rainfall rate rather than an annual total, which is why a partly blocked gutter handles an average week and fails in a thunderstorm.
Debris leaves the property bagged, and rinse water stays on the property and is released across a vegetated area. Under 40 CFR 122.26(b)(2) a discharge to a municipal separate storm sewer that is not composed entirely of storm water is an illicit discharge absent an NPDES permit, and inside the Atlanta city limits section 74-428 of the Atlanta City Code lists yard wastes and cleaning chemicals among the pollutants section 74-436 prohibits from entering the city storm sewer system.
Gutter cleaning happens building by building, so the only area out of service at any moment is the drop zone beside the building being worked. Thrare Contracting marks that zone with cones, works it, clears it, and moves on before starting the next building, which keeps a community's parking count intact through the visit.
Each visit closes with a per building report: photographs of the cleaned runs, the condition of hangers, seams, miters, end caps and fascia, the result of the downspout flow test, the discharge point check, and a punch list of anything found outside the cleaning scope. The report is written to drop into a board packet or a maintenance file without rework, and it is in the base price rather than sold as an add on.
Rare Earth Ltd, doing business as Thrare Contracting, holds DBE, ACDBE and MBE certification, qualifies as a small disadvantaged business, is registered in SAM under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 and CAGE 9JAV8, and is enrolled in E-Verify. Rare Earth Ltd does not hold HUBZone certification, 8(a) certification or SOC 2 attestation and does not represent otherwise.
Section 74-133 of the Atlanta City Code bars motorized landscape maintenance devices including leaf blowers from 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. in or within 300 feet of residential and mixed-use zoning districts, while section 74-134 opens the construction noise window at 7:00 a.m. on a weekday and 9:00 a.m. on a weekend or legal holiday. Thrare Contracting sequences the quiet work first and starts blower work after 8:00 a.m. next to occupied buildings.
Send the building count and the approximate linear footage of gutter, or the site plan, and name the city the property sits in so the right local ordinance is quoted in the scope. Serving metro Atlanta from 8735 Dunwoody Pl, Ste R, Atlanta, GA 30350.