Roof drainage maintenance for organizations that own or manage buildings inside the Dunwoody city limits. Rare Earth Ltd operates from Atlanta and covers Dunwoody as a service area.
Gutter cleaning is sold to organizations here, never to households. The buyers in Dunwoody are apartment and condominium communities, homeowner associations and the third party firms that manage them, office and retail landlords around Perimeter Center, schools, houses of worship, and public agencies with buildings inside the city. A portfolio account works because a single mobilization reaches a dozen roofs, the scope recurs against a line the property already funds, and the signer wants an inspection record rather than a promise.
A homeowner with a clogged trough on a Dunwoody cul de sac is not a customer for this service, and no amount of scheduling will change that. Pressure washing is the sole exterior service Rare Earth Ltd will sell to a single family owner. Saying so in the opening paragraph is faster than saying it on a call three days later.
Rare Earth Ltd trades as Thrare Contracting. The firm carries DBE, ACDBE and MBE certification, meets the small disadvantaged business definition, runs E-Verify, and is registered in SAM under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 and CAGE 9JAV8. It holds no HUBZone designation, no 8(a) participation and no SOC 2 attestation, and it will not imply otherwise in a bid. Everything on the held list is checkable in a public database before a purchasing officer picks up the phone.
Dunwoody sits inside DeKalb County but runs its own municipal separate storm sewer system under the Georgia Environmental Protection Division's General NPDES Permit for Phase II MS4s, and it maintains a Stormwater Management Program describing the activities it performs each year to stay compliant (City of Dunwoody, Stormwater, read 2026-09-02). That program document, dated June 4, 2023 and filed against General NPDES Permit No. GAG610000, names the City's own legal authority for illicit discharge work: Code of Ordinances Chapter 32, Article IV, Division 9, Illicit Discharge and Illegal Connection, adapted from the model ordinance of the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District (City of Dunwoody Stormwater Management Program, read 2026-09-02).
Division 9 fixes its own reach rather than borrowing one. Section 32-477(b) reads: "The provisions of this division shall apply throughout the incorporated area of the city." A building with a Dunwoody municipal address answers to that division. It is the City's ordinance, enforced by the City's community development department, and a county stormwater document is the wrong citation to hand a Dunwoody inspector (City of Dunwoody Code of Ordinances, Chapter 32, Article IV, Division 9, read on Municode 2026-09-02; the code as published was codified through Ordinance No. 2026-04-05, enacted April 27, 2026, Supplement 49).
Section 32-478(a) is the prohibition a vendor scope has to satisfy: "No person shall throw, drain, or otherwise discharge, cause, or allow others under its control to throw, drain, or otherwise discharge into the municipal separate storm sewer system any pollutants or waters containing any pollutants, other than stormwater." Read the phrase "allow others under its control" slowly. It places the property that hired the crew inside the same sentence as the crew.
The exemption list under that prohibition is where Dunwoody differs from its neighbors, and the difference matters to an exterior contractor. Dunwoody exempts water line flushing performed 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 groundwater, 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 flows. There is no exemption for washing anything. Not a vehicle, not a walkway, not a building. A crew rinsing a gutter face in Dunwoody has no line on that list to stand on.
The definition of pollutant in Section 32-474 closes the remaining gap. It expressly includes "nonhazardous liquid and solid wastes and yard wastes; refuse, rubbish, garbage, litter, or other discarded or abandoned objects and accumulations" and "detergents (biodegradable or otherwise)" and "floatables". Wet leaf pack lifted out of a trough is yard waste. A shingle granule slurry is an accumulation. Choosing a biodegradable cleaner does not move the rinse water out of the definition, because the ordinance names biodegradable detergents specifically.
Three duties in Division 9 fall on the property rather than on the contractor, and most Dunwoody managers have never had them pointed out.
Penalties under Section 32-475 are civil and criminal both. The municipal court may impose up to $1,000.00 for each day a violation remains unremedied after the notice of violation, and for intentional and flagrant violations the City may cite a person to answer charges punishable by a fine up to $1,000.00 or imprisonment for 60 days or both, with each day treated as a separate offense. Section 32-480 gives the City a right of entry to inspect, sample, photograph and videotape, obliges the owner or operator to clear any obstruction to that access at their own cost, and makes unreasonable delay in granting access a violation in itself.
None of that changes the field instruction. Bag the debris, contain the rinse, keep both out of the inlet. What it changes is who writes the citation, what the unpaid cost attaches to, and whose file the three year record lives in.
Wider frame: the federal and state layer sitting above this ordinance, and why crossing a city line swaps the governing rule.
Dunwoody publishes the condition of the system its buildings drain into, which is unusual and useful. The City reports spending more than $1 million annually replacing or lining failing stormwater pipes connected to the public right of way, and states that nearly all the failing pipes are corrugated metal pipes that have rusted out with age. Those pipes were designed for a service life of 30 to 40 years, and many of the pipes in Dunwoody were installed more than 30 years ago. The City has identified four miles of pipe in the right of way that has not yet failed but will likely need rehabilitation within five to ten years on age and condition rating. Since 2009, repairs have been made to 6.4 miles of pipe, and as of February 2023 an additional 836 feet had been lined using American Rescue Plan funds (City of Dunwoody, Stormwater, read 2026-09-02).
Read that as a scheduling fact rather than a civics fact. Downstream capacity in Dunwoody is being rebuilt segment by segment while the buildings above it keep shedding water on the same schedule they always did. A community that lets a downspout back up is loading a public system already carrying a known rehabilitation backlog, and the overflow lands on its own foundation first.
Water quality is measured here too. Dunwoody lies in the Upper Chattahoochee watershed and has nine individual drainage basins. Two streams inside the city, Marsh Creek and Nancy Creek, appear on the 2024 list of impaired 303(d) waters that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved on September 3, 2024, and the City monitors both for the pollutant causing the impairment (City of Dunwoody, Stormwater, read 2026-09-02). A property whose roof drainage discharges toward a monitored impaired stream is not a good candidate for a vendor who rinses debris into the nearest grate.
Dunwoody bills stormwater by impervious area, and the code says exactly how it converts a building into a unit of charge. Section 32-503 defines the equivalent residential unit as "the median impervious coverage of a statistical sampling of single detached dwelling lots in the city, which has been determined to be 3,000 square feet of impervious area." The same section defines impervious surface to include rooftops alongside sidewalks, walkways, patio areas, driveways, parking lots, storage areas and compacted gravel (City of Dunwoody Code of Ordinances, Chapter 32, Article V, Stormwater Utility, read on Municode 2026-09-02).
A 3,000 square foot yardstick is a small one. It means a Dunwoody apartment building with an 8,000 square foot roof plate is already carrying more than two and a half ERUs on its roof alone, before a single parking space or sidewalk is counted, and a garden style community with twelve such buildings is measured on roughly 32 ERUs of roof. The fee is a standing statement, renewed every billing cycle, of how much surface the property has asked the drainage system to accept.
The code also names the ways a property can argue with the number, and both are documentation exercises. Credits against the service fee are available for on site systems and facilities, determined against the technical requirements, design and performance standards in the Georgia Stormwater Management Manual; the application has to be filed before January 1 of the billing year and the City decides within 45 days. An appeal under Section 32-512 must be filed in writing and must include a survey prepared by a registered land surveyor or professional engineer showing total property area, impervious surface area, and any other feature influencing the property's hydrologic response. There is one outright exemption of interest, at the end of the exempt list: any property where 100 percent of the stormwater runoff is contained on the premises and none enters the stormwater management system.
Section 32-505(c) is the sentence a manager should file away. The stormwater utility "shall provide for inspection of private facilities to ascertain that the stormwater systems are operating as intended," and may perform remedial maintenance based on the severity of the problem and the hazard to the public. A private drainage system in Dunwoody is inspectable. A blocked one is visible from the ground during the storm that reveals it.
The design condition is regional. 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). Dunwoody's own public works pages describe the city as managing runoff from roughly 50 inches of rain each year, which is the same number arriving from a different direction (City of Dunwoody, Stormwater, read 2026-09-02).
Rain converts to volume at 0.623 gallons per square foot per inch. Put the 50.43 inch normal against a single 8,000 square foot Dunwoody apartment roof and the answer is roughly 251,000 gallons a year. Multiply by the twelve buildings of a mid sized community and the property is routing about 3.0 million gallons annually through troughs and downspouts whose yearly maintenance costs a fraction of one building's roof deck.
Annual totals are not what breaks a gutter, though. Georgia's adopted plumbing code is the International Plumbing Code, 2024 edition, with Georgia amendments, made a mandatory state minimum code effective January 1, 2026 by the Department of Community Affairs. A trough sized under that code is sized as a clear cross section carrying a design storm. Packed oak leaf, pine straw mat and shingle grit occupy part of that cross section permanently, and the storm the trough was engineered against does not shrink to fit what is left.
Mechanics: how a trough cross section is sized and what debris takes out of it.
Dunwoody regulates equipment noise by clock and by calendar in Chapter 18 of its code, and the rule that governs a gutter visit is written for landscape contractors rather than for construction. Section 18-19(b)(10)b provides that landscape contractors using any type of motorized mower or mechanical blower and other equipment which creates loud and excessive noise are prohibited before 7:30 a.m. or after 8:30 p.m. on weekdays, before 8:00 a.m. or after 8:30 p.m. on Saturdays, and at any time on Sundays and on six named legal holidays: New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day, each as observed (City of Dunwoody Code of Ordinances, Chapter 18, Section 18-19, read on Municode 2026-09-02).
The practical shape of that is a thirteen hour weekday window, a twelve and a half hour Saturday window, and a hard Sunday stop. No Sunday exception exists for private property work, which rules out the quietest day of the week at an office park where a weekday roof visit competes with tenant traffic. A community planning a fall program around Thanksgiving week has to route around the holiday itself, not merely around resident preference.
Two other subsections shape equipment choice. Section 18-19(b)(15) makes it a violation to operate a noise creating blower or power fan, or an internal combustion engine, unless the blower noise is muffled and the engine carries a muffler device sufficient to deaden the noise. Section 18-19(a) is a general nuisance clause covering any loud, unnecessary or unusual noise that disturbs the comfort, repose, health, peace or safety of others in the city, which means a technically legal hour is still not a defense against an unmuffled machine.
The exemptions do not cover a private property's vendor. Section 18-19(c) exempts emergency repair work as determined by the City of Dunwoody, and utility or road work done under the approval or authority of the City, DeKalb County or the State of Georgia. A crew working a privately owned Dunwoody apartment community is none of those. Section 18-19(d) does provide a formal path for commercial, office, institutional and industrial construction related activities to apply for a noise ordinance exception through the Community Development Director and the chief of police, decided within ten days of receipt, but it is an application with stated findings, not a courtesy. The ordinance history runs from the 2008 compiled ordinances through Ordinance No. 2017-02-04, adopted February 27, 2017, and Ordinance No. 2019-05-10, adopted May 6, 2019.
Dunwoody protects the canopy that fills its gutters, and the two facts belong in the same paragraph. The City describes roughly 150 miles of public rights of way carrying a dense tree canopy of mixed native pines and hardwoods, plus more than 170 acres of parks and other public property featuring mature trees, mature stands and forested areas. Preservation standards sit in Chapter 16, Division 6, Tree Preservation, and the City adopted a comprehensive Tree Inventory and Assessment in 2012 as an amendment to its Comprehensive Land Use Plan (City of Dunwoody, Tree Regulations, read 2026-09-02).
On the parcels this page is written for, removal is permitted work. The City states that on non-residential, mixed-use and multi-family zoned lots, a tree removal permit is required to take any hardwood of ten inches diameter at breast height or greater, any softwood of 20 inches DBH or greater, and any understory tree of six inches DBH or greater. A permit application calls for a site plan or detailed sketch showing species, approximate size and location of every tree to be removed and preserved, a photograph of each tree, and the applicable fee, and the city arborist may ask for a tree survey, a replacement plan or a third party arborist report on top of that.
Stream corridors are stricter again. Dunwoody requires a 75 foot undisturbed buffer around streams, within which land disturbance and tree removal generally need permits from the State or the City, and unpermitted work inside a stream buffer can draw a citation. This page publishes no penalty figure for that, because the amount depends on which instrument is enforced and no figure was read from the City's own document. A Dunwoody community with a creek along its rear property line has a wooded edge it is not going to thin, which is exactly the edge whose leaves reach the nearest building.
Put the two together and the maintenance conclusion is unavoidable. Debris load on a Dunwoody commercial or multifamily roof is managed on a cleaning calendar, because the cheaper looking option, cutting the trees back, is a permitted process with an arborist, a fee, a replacement obligation under the minimum density rule at Section 16-109(b)(2), and in a buffer a real penalty schedule.
The City's own description of the canopy, a mix of native pines and hardwoods, predicts a split debris season rather than one leaf drop. The pine share sheds needles heavily in late spring and again in autumn, and pine straw is the material that mats. It knits into a fibrous plug that water passes through slowly and then not at all, and it does not decay away over a winter the way a soft leaf will. The hardwood share arrives later and heavier, and a hardwood drop in this canopy runs several weeks rather than one weekend.
That produces the standard Dunwoody pattern: two visits a year on most properties, timed to land after the pine drop and after the hardwood drop, with a third visit earned by any building whose roof edge sits within the drip line of a mature stand or a protected buffer. Which buildings those are is not a judgment call to make from a parking lot. It comes out of the per building condition report, and it is normal for two buildings on one Dunwoody property to sit on different intervals for the whole life of an account.
The buried side of the system deserves its own attention here, and the ordinance already framed why. Where a downspout enters the ground and the run is not shown on any plan the property holds, Section 32-478(b)(4) makes locating it the owner's job once the City asks. A crew that flushes and flow tests every buried connection during a routine visit is building that record incrementally, at no extra mobilization, which is a better position than commissioning a locate under a notice of violation.
The service follows the water from the shingle edge to the point where it leaves the parcel, which is a longer run than the trough a manager can see from the sidewalk. Troughs, hangers, outlets, downspouts, elbows, splash blocks and buried connections are all on the path, and a cleaning that stops at the visible trough has cleaned the easiest third of the problem.
Itemized: the full metro scope of work.
Itemized: the occupied property work sequence.
Five inputs, and the quote names all five: linear feet of trough, story count, the access method for each roof plane, the debris load found on the walk, and visits per year. A manager holding two bids needs to see which input the other contractor left out, because that is almost always where the difference in price is hiding.
Itemized: where the cleaning price stops and repair work begins.
The governing text: the OSHA citations for work at height.
The exclusion is what a Dunwoody buyer should ask about. 29 CFR 1910.28, paragraph (a)(2)(i), states that the section does not apply "To portable ladders". On a two story Dunwoody walk up, most real exposure sits on a ladder rather than at a roof edge, so a bid comparison that ends at whether the vendor owns harnesses has skipped past the question with the answer in it. Ask instead how each roof plane on your specific buildings gets reached, and what changes on the elevations where the ground will not take a ladder foot.
Coverage: every city on the metro map.
No. This service is sold only to apartment and condominium communities, homeowner associations and their management companies, commercial and retail owners, and government and institutional facilities. Pressure washing is the only exterior service Rare Earth Ltd offers to a single family homeowner.
The City of Dunwoody's own. Section 32-477(b) of Chapter 32, Article IV, Division 9 states that "The provisions of this division shall apply throughout the incorporated area of the city", and the City is permitted under Georgia EPD's General NPDES Permit for Phase II MS4s. A DeKalb County stormwater document is the wrong citation for a Dunwoody municipal address.
No. The exemptions in Section 32-478(a) cover government water line flushing, potable water, landscape irrigation, groundwater, footing drains, crawl space pumps, air conditioning condensate, springs, wetland flows and firefighting flows. None of them covers washing a building. Section 32-474 defines a pollutant to include yard waste, litter, floatables and detergents whether biodegradable or otherwise, so rinse water off a gutter face has to be contained on the property.
No. Section 18-19(b)(10)b prohibits landscape contractors from running motorized mowers, mechanical blowers or similar loud equipment at any time on Sundays and on six named observed holidays. On weekdays the window runs 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., and on Saturdays 8:00 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.
By impervious area. The code sets one equivalent residential unit at 3,000 square feet of impervious area, the median impervious coverage of a statistical sampling of single detached dwelling lots in the city, and its definition of impervious surface names rooftops. Credits require an application filed before January 1 of the billing year, decided within 45 days, and a fee appeal must include a survey by a registered land surveyor or professional engineer.
Two visits a year is the starting cycle, one after the pine drop and one after the hardwood drop, because the City describes its canopy as a mix of native pines and hardwoods rather than a single species. Buildings whose roof edge sits under a mature stand or inside the 75 foot stream buffer earn a third visit. The per building condition report is what moves a building between tiers.
A per building condition report with before and after photographs, downspout flow test results for each building, a note on any buried connection that failed to clear, and a punch list of findings outside the cleaning scope such as pulled hangers, loose spikes, damaged fascia or a collapsed underground run. That record is also the property's evidence of routine maintenance if the City ever asks.
No. The work runs building by building, so the only area out of service at any moment is the coned drop zone beside the elevation being cleaned. That zone is worked, cleared and released before the crew repositions, which keeps the community's parking count intact across the visit.
Generally not without a permit. On non-residential, mixed-use and multi-family zoned lots the City requires a tree removal permit for any hardwood of ten inches DBH or greater, any softwood of 20 inches DBH or greater, and any understory tree of six inches DBH or greater, with a minimum density rule at Section 16-109(b)(2) behind it. Inside the City's 75 foot stream buffer, unpermitted work can draw a citation, and the penalty depends on which instrument is enforced.
On five inputs: linear feet of trough, story count, roof access method, debris load, and visits per year. Gutter repair, fascia and soffit carpentry, roof repair, buried drain line excavation and tree work sit outside the cleaning price and are quoted separately.
Rare Earth Ltd, doing business as Thrare Contracting, holds DBE, ACDBE and MBE certification, meets the small disadvantaged business definition, runs E-Verify, and is registered in SAM under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 and CAGE 9JAV8. It does not hold HUBZone status, 8(a) status or a SOC 2 attestation and does not represent otherwise.
Federal and state background: the Clean Water Act and Georgia EPD layer.
Send the building count and the approximate linear feet of trough, or the site plan, and note any buried downspout run the property has never had documented. Serving Dunwoody and DeKalb County from Atlanta.