Apartment communities, homeowner associations, office and retail centers and public facilities inside the Marietta city limits and across Cobb County
Gutter cleaning at Thrare Contracting is a business to business service. The buyers are apartment and condominium communities, homeowner associations and the third party managers who run them, office parks, retail centers, houses of worship, schools and public agency facilities. Rare Earth Ltd operates from an Atlanta office at 8735 Dunwoody Pl, Ste R, Atlanta, GA 30350, and Marietta is inside the service radius rather than the home base.
A portfolio buys this well for a reason that has nothing to do with marketing. Every building on one site shares an access plan, a debris profile and a billing cycle, so the cost per linear foot falls as the building count rises, and the property gets one report covering the entire community instead of nine service tickets that never get compared to one another.
Single family gutter cleaning is not sold at any price. Pressure washing is the sole service Rare Earth Ltd offers to a homeowner. Anyone searching for a ladder crew to clear the gutters on a house in Marietta should call a residential specialist, and saying so on this page is faster than saying it on the phone.
The legal entity is Rare Earth Ltd and Thrare Contracting is its trade name. The firm carries DBE and MBE certification, meets the small disadvantaged business definition, and is active in SAM.gov under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 with CAGE code 9JAV8. It claims no HUBZone certification, no 8(a) program participation and no SOC 2 attestation, and a procurement officer can confirm every item of that in a public database without contacting anyone at this company.
Marietta writes and enforces its own illicit discharge ordinance, and that ordinance is what a vendor scope on a Marietta property has to satisfy. Article 7-8-18 of the Marietta Code, Illicit Discharge and Illegal Connection, states its reach at Section 7-8-18-010(B): "The provisions of this article shall apply throughout the corporate area of the City of Marietta." The public works director administers and enforces it (Marietta Code of Ordinances, Article 7-8-18, Ord. No. 6636, 3/10/2004, read on Municode 2026-09-02).
Section 7-8-18-020 defines an illicit discharge as "any direct or indirect nonstormwater discharge to the municipal separate storm sewer system, except as exempted in Section 7-8-18-030." Two details in that article decide what a crew may do with rinse water, and both are regularly misquoted.
First, the phrase "wash water" sits in the definition of an illegal connection, not in the definition of an illicit discharge. A manager who goes looking for the words "wash water" inside the illicit discharge definition will not find them and may conclude the rinse is unregulated. The prohibition that actually bites is broader than any word list: Section 7-8-18-030(A) forbids the nonstormwater discharge itself.
Second, the ordinance's definition of a pollutant names cleaning products outright. It includes "detergents (biodegradable or otherwise); degreasers; cleaning chemicals." The parenthetical is the operative part. Choosing a biodegradable product does not move the discharge outside the definition, so a bid that answers a compliance question with the word "biodegradable" has not answered it.
Section 7-8-18-030(A) states the prohibition itself: "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." Two things follow from that sentence. The clause "allow others under its control" places the property inside the prohibition next to its vendor, so a management company cannot subcontract the exposure away. And the exemptions the public works director may grant are a closed list covering water line flushing, landscape irrigation, diverted stream flows, ground water, footing and crawl space drains, air conditioning condensate, springs, wetland flows, firefighting flows and any other water source containing no pollutants. Rinse water off a gutter face is none of those.
One vocabulary trap is worth flagging before a manager reads the ordinance alone. The MS4 definition in Section 7-8-18-020 lists "curbs, gutters, inlets, catch basins" among the facilities that make up the city system. Those are street gutters in the public right of way, not the trough on a building. A building's roof drainage is private property throughout, which is precisely why the discharge from it is the owner's problem rather than the City's.
The reach of the city system is narrower than most people assume. The ordinance scopes the municipal separate storm sewer system to a facility "(a) Owned or maintained by the city," which is why the private catch basin in the middle of an apartment parking field and the public inlet at the curb are two different legal objects that a crew has to treat as one.
Cobb County Water publishes its own pressure washing guidance, and it is good guidance, but it is county guidance. Cobb County Code Section 50-181 scopes the county storm sewer system to conveyances "owned or maintained by unincorporated Cobb County." A property with a Marietta city address is not governed by that county document, and a vendor who cites it as the governing rule on a Marietta job has cited the wrong government.
Background on the federal layer underneath all of this: how the Clean Water Act and Georgia EPD frame a stormwater discharge.
Marietta does not leave this to inference. The City publishes a business facing stormwater sheet through its Engineering division, and its instructions read like a field procedure rather than a slogan (City of Marietta, Businesses and Stormwater, mariettaga.gov, read 2026-09-02).
Read those four lines together and the sequence a compliant exterior visit follows is already written for you by the city: dry removal first, containment second, rinse last and smallest, and no chlorine chemistry anywhere the runoff can reach a drain. That is exactly how a gutter is cleaned by hand, which is a large part of why hand removal survives on commercial properties long after the equipment catalogs said it would not.
The City frames the goal the same way on its Keep it Clean page: the only thing that needs to go into a storm drain is stormwater. Marietta's stormwater program describes the NPDES permit it works under as protecting the waters that drain to the Chattahoochee River and Lake Allatoona, which is a genuine peculiarity of this city. Marietta sheds to two receiving waters, so the answer to "where does this end up" depends on which side of the drainage divide a given building sits on (City of Marietta, Stormwater Management, mariettaga.gov, read 2026-09-02).
This is the question that changes a gutter cleaning line item from housekeeping into risk management, and Marietta answers it in Article 7-8-14, Post-Development Stormwater Management for New Development and Redevelopment, adopted by Ordinance No. 8204 on December 9, 2020 (Marietta Code of Ordinances, Article 7-8-14, read on Municode 2026-09-02).
Section 7-8-14-060(A) puts the duty on the owner in four verbs: the owner executes an agreement with the City "obligating the owner to inspect, clean, maintain, and repair the stormwater management system, including vegetation in the final BMP landscaping plan." The word "clean" is in the ordinance. It is not a service description invented by a contractor.
Three further provisions are worth a manager's attention because they attach to the asset rather than to whoever happens to be running it this year.
Older properties do not escape by predating the paperwork. Section 7-8-14-070(B) provides that where no agreement was recorded or one was invalidated, an owner's failure to maintain the system "so that it performs as it was originally designed" is treated as a property maintenance violation, and the City may reach for "prosecution, penalties, abatement, and emergency measures." Section 7-8-14-070(C) extends the same duty to systems approved and built under standards predating the current Georgia Stormwater Management Manual.
How far up the roof that duty reaches is a site specific question, and the honest answer is that the recorded agreement for a given property decides it. What the ordinance does establish is the shape of the object: Section 7-8-14-020 defines the stormwater management system as "the entire set of non-structural site design features and structural BMPs for collection, conveyance, storage, infiltration, treatment, and disposal of stormwater runoff." Collection and conveyance lead that list, and on a garden style community the first collection and conveyance stage is the gutter, the downspout and the buried leader that carries the water toward whatever pond or vault the plan approved. A downspout discharging at the wall instead of into its leader is a conveyance defect, and it is visible from the ground in a photograph.
Article 7-8-14 governs new work at a threshold: Section 7-8-14-010(D) applies the stormwater management standards to development that creates, adds or replaces 5,000 square feet or more of impervious surface or disturbs one acre or more. A routine gutter cleaning is nowhere near that threshold and triggers nothing. The maintenance duties in Sections 7-8-14-060 and 7-8-14-070 are the parts that run continuously on an already built property, which is the state nearly every property this page is written for is in.
No, and a portfolio manager holding properties on both sides of the Marietta city line should know why. On June 1, 2026 the Cobb County Water System replaced stormwater funding through water and sewer rates with a dedicated stormwater utility fee, and it stated the boundary plainly: the fee covers customers in unincorporated Cobb County and the City of Mableton, and "The Water System does not provide stormwater services within the other cities in Cobb County, so our customers within other city limits will not be charged our stormwater utility fee" (Cobb County Water System, Stormwater Funding, read 2026-09-02).
The county fee is measured off the roof. One stormwater equivalent residential unit is 3,700 square feet of impervious surface at $4.75 per month, and the County publishes its own worked example for a non-residential parcel: 20,000 square feet of impervious surface divided by 3,700 square feet, multiplied by $4.75, equals $25.68 per month. Impervious area is determined from aerial photography, and the County publishes a parcel level impervious surface map so an owner can see the number their bill is built on.
Apply that published formula to a fourteen building community with 91,000 square feet of roof and the roof alone accounts for about 24.6 equivalent residential units, or roughly $117 a month, before a square foot of parking is counted. In unincorporated Cobb that is a line on a monthly utility bill. Inside the Marietta city limits the County does not bill it, because the Water System states it does not provide stormwater services there.
The operational consequence is not the money. It is that the same regional portfolio answers to two different regulators with two different documents, two different enforcement contacts and two different definitions of the system, and a vendor working the whole portfolio has to know which one applies at each gate code. A single compliance paragraph pasted across a metro wide contract is wrong on one side of the line by construction.
Most city pages treat tree canopy as scenery. In Marietta it is a schedule input, because the City's zoning ordinance dictates what species stand closest to a commercial roof edge and a parking field, and it dictates that the property may not simply remove them. The governing text is Division 712.08 of the Marietta Zoning Ordinance, Tree Protection and Landscaping, which names "moderation of storm water runoff and improved water quality" among the benefits it exists to secure (City of Marietta Zoning Ordinance, Division 712.08, updated 4.10.25, read 2026-09-02).
Section 712.08(B) applies the standards to all real property in the City, with a short exemption list that includes a lot holding no more than two dwelling units, nurseries and tree farms, ball fields, parks and lakes, and any property zoned Central Business District. An apartment community, an office park or a shopping center sits squarely inside the regulated set.
Now the part that determines debris. Two requirements in Section 712.08(G) put broadleaf canopy trees, and specifically not pines, directly over the pavement and along the drive lanes of a Marietta commercial site.
Read that as a debris forecast rather than as a landscape standard. A Marietta commercial site is required by ordinance to place broadleaf canopy trees on a fixed spacing along its drives and inside its parking field, and is forbidden from satisfying that requirement with pines. Broadleaf litter behaves differently in a trough than needle litter does: it arrives in a compressed window, it lies flat, and a wet mat of it seals a downspout opening in a way scattered needles do not. Needle litter is the slower, year round problem. Marietta's ordinance guarantees a property gets the first kind whether or not it also has the second.
The ordinance also prices preservation in a way that keeps the largest broadleaf trees standing. Table E awards density credit by trunk diameter and by type, and the gap widens sharply at the top of the scale: a hardwood measuring 41 inches or more at breast height earns 7.0 density units, while an evergreen of the same size earns 2.5. At 25 to 40 inches the split is 4.5 against 2.0. A replacement tree planted at 2 inch caliper is worth 0.4 units, so the ordinance values one mature hardwood at more than seventeen newly planted trees.
The site density requirement is stated as a minimum that "must be achieved whether or not a site had trees prior to development," and the ordinance's own worked example runs a 2.2 acre site at 2.2 multiplied by 17 for a Site Density Factor of 37.4 units. A property that falls short plants trees, or pays into the City of Marietta Tree Replacement Fund, and Section 712.08(M) caps alternative compliance at 75 percent of the required density units. Removal is not a shortcut either: under Section 712.08(D)(3) a tree may not be removed without prior authorization from the Department of Development Services except where sudden weather created an imminent hazard, dead or hazardous trees require a Notification of Tree Removal verified by City staff, and a decision issues no later than 10 business days after the complete submission.
Section 712.08(J)(5) then assigns the upkeep: "The owner, occupant, tenant or agent, shall be jointly responsible for the maintenance of all landscaping." A Marietta property cannot cut its debris load down, it cannot pave its way out of the planter islands, and the people who would benefit from doing so are the same people the ordinance names as responsible. The only remaining variable is how often the troughs under that canopy get cleared.
Marietta publishes its sound level limits by the category of the property receiving the noise, not by the equipment making it, and the City does not name a code section on that page (City of Marietta, Noise Ordinance, mariettaga.gov, read 2026-09-02).
One line on that page does more scheduling work than the numbers do: "Sound level readings will be measured at or within the real property line of the receiving property." The limit belongs to the neighbor, not to the job. A blower run at the back of an office park whose rear boundary touches an industrial parcel is measured against 70 dBA. The identical blower run at the front of the same building, across a street from a residential receiving property, is measured against 65. A crew that plans building order by which boundary each elevation faces is working a real constraint rather than guessing at one.
The complaint path is equally concrete and worth knowing before a visit rather than after one. Marietta Code Enforcement takes noise investigation requests at 770-794-5439 Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., and outside those hours a caller reaches the Marietta Police Department non-emergency line at 770-499-3911. The City asks a complainant for the violator's address, the type of noise and the times and dates, which is a reminder that the record a manager keeps of when a vendor was on site is the record that resolves the question.
Practically, this pushes the loud part of a gutter visit into the middle of the day and keeps it away from boundaries facing residences early and late. On an occupied community the same instinct is already good manners. In Marietta it is also the measurement standard.
The design condition comes from the airport, because that is the station with a long, continuous record. 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 a Cobb County roof sheds about 31.4 gallons per square foot per year.
Run that against a real community rather than an abstraction. Fourteen buildings at 6,500 square feet of roof each is 91,000 square feet, and 91,000 square feet at 31.4 gallons is roughly 2.86 million gallons a year that has to find a downspout. A single building on that property moves about 204,000 gallons. Every gallon of it passes through a trough and a leader whose annual maintenance costs a fraction of one roof replacement on one of those fourteen buildings.
Cobb County itself is wetter than the airport, and NOAA's own normals show it. Two Cobb stations carry published 1991-2020 normals: US1GACB0016, MARIETTA 8.3 NE, at 53.48 inches, and US1GACB0002 at 51.06 inches. Both figures are NOAA's published 1991-2020 normals, and neither is a 30-year average of that station's own record. The NCEI daily record for US1GACB0016 begins 2009-03-04 and the record for US1GACB0002 begins 2008-04-01, so the normals are computed products rather than direct station averages, and they should be quoted that way or not at all (NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, station records read 2026-09-02).
Take the higher Cobb figure at face value and the same fourteen building community moves about 3.03 million gallons rather than 2.86 million, a difference on the order of 173,000 gallons a year across the property. That gap is smaller than the gap between a clear trough and a blocked one, which is the point. Volume is not what fails a drainage system. Cross section is.
Georgia's adopted plumbing code sizes that cross section. The state minimum is the International Plumbing Code, 2024 edition, with Georgia amendments, mandatory from January 1, 2026 under the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. A trough is sized as an open channel with a design flow depth. Packed leaf litter, roof grit and the fines that wash off an aging shingle occupy part of that channel permanently, and the storm the channel was sized against does not scale itself down to what is left. A gutter that handles a steady November drizzle at half capacity overtops in the first hard summer cell.
Sizing detail: how a gutter is sized and what debris does to that number.
The unit of work is the drainage path, from the point where water leaves the roof plane to the point where it is released, and not the length of trough a person can see from the parking lot. On a Marietta property that path usually includes a buried leader, and a buried leader is where the failures hide.
Full scope definition: everything a commercial gutter cleaning covers.
Work outside that path is quoted as its own line rather than folded in. Gutter and downspout replacement, fascia and soffit carpentry, roof repair, excavation of a collapsed buried line, and tree trimming are separate scopes with separate risk, and pricing them inside a cleaning number is how a cleaning bid becomes unreadable.
Where the boundary sits: what a cleaning price does and does not include.
General method: how work is staged on an occupied property.
The Marietta specific adjustments sit in the ordering rather than in the technique.
Five inputs, and a quote that names all five can be checked against the next bid line by line: total linear footage of trough, height and story count at each elevation, the access method each building forces, the debris load the site actually carries, and how many visits a year the schedule holds. Nothing else moves the number, and a bid that will not disclose which of the five it priced against is asking to be taken on faith.
No prices appear on this page. A Marietta community with fourteen two story buildings under mature canopy and a Marietta office building with a single parapet roof and interior drains are not the same job, and publishing a rate would only mislead one of them.
Terrain sets the consequence and canopy sets the frequency. Cobb County sites roll, and on a graded site an overflowing trough does not shed evenly along a wall. Water migrates to the low end of the run and leaves at one or two points in volume, which is what cuts a channel through a bed, saturates the soil behind a retaining wall and pushes water toward the lowest slab elevation on the property. The same total volume spread evenly would be a nuisance. Concentrated at one corner it is a claim.
Frequency then follows the canopy the ordinance requires. Two visits a year is the base cycle for a Marietta community: one after the broadleaf drop that the required street trees and parking island trees deliver, and one after the spring load. Sites that also sit under mature pine, or whose rear elevations back onto an undisturbed buffer, earn three or four. The condition report from each visit is the evidence that moves a property between those tiers, and it is the only honest basis for doing so, because no one can tell from a contract what a given roof edge collects.
Marietta's own regulation of the buffer edge is worth knowing here. Article 7-8-16 establishes a stream buffer 20 feet outward from the top of bank on both sides of streams shown on the City of Marietta Chattahoochee River Tributary Protection Map dated February 1984, and it provides that "ordinary landscape maintenance shall not be considered as land-disturbing activity." A violation of that article is a misdemeanor carrying a fine of up to $500.00 and up to 30 days, with each day a separate offense (Marietta Code of Ordinances, Article 7-8-16, Code 1978 § 7-9004, Ord. No. 5575, 6/12/96, read on Municode 2026-09-02). Routine maintenance is not the regulated activity. Trenching a new drain line near a buffered stream is, and knowing which one a punch list item is before it starts is cheaper than finding out afterward.
Cited in full, with the regulation text: the OSHA fall protection standards for this work.
The Marietta specific question is access rather than regulation. A two story walk up with landscaping tight to the wall, a three story building with a parapet, and a single story retail strip with a rear service drive are three different access problems on the same street, and each one changes who can reach the trough and how long the building takes. A manager comparing bids on a Marietta property gets more from asking how a vendor plans to reach each roof plane than from asking what safety equipment the vendor owns.
Coverage elsewhere in the metro: the rest of the cities this hub covers.
No. Gutter cleaning is sold only to apartment and condominium communities, homeowner associations and their management companies, commercial property owners, and public and institutional facilities. Pressure washing is the one service Rare Earth Ltd sells to a single family homeowner.
A property with a City of Marietta address answers to Article 7-8-18 of the Marietta Code, which applies throughout the corporate area of the City and is enforced by the Marietta public works director. Cobb County Code Section 50-181 scopes the county system to conveyances owned or maintained by unincorporated Cobb County, so county pressure washing guidance is county guidance and does not govern a Marietta city address.
Yes. Marietta Code Section 7-8-14-060(A) obligates the owner to inspect, clean, maintain and repair the stormwater management system, the recorded agreement runs with the land and binds successors in title, and Section 7-8-14-070 treats a failure to keep the system performing as originally designed as a property maintenance violation subject to prosecution, penalties, abatement and emergency measures.
No. The Cobb County Water System implemented its dedicated stormwater utility fee on June 1, 2026 for customers in unincorporated Cobb County and the City of Mableton, and states that it does not provide stormwater services within the other Cobb cities, so customers inside those city limits are not charged the county fee.
Two visits a year is the base cycle, one after the broadleaf drop and one after the spring load. Communities under mature pine or with rear elevations against an undisturbed buffer earn three or four visits, and the per building condition report from each visit is the evidence used to move a property between those tiers.
No. Work advances one building at a time, so the only area out of service at any moment is the coned drop zone beside the building being worked. That zone is set, worked, cleared and moved, which leaves the community's total parking count unchanged across the visit.
Each visit produces a per building condition report with before and after photographs at each drop, a record of which downspouts and buried connections were flow tested, and a punch list of conditions found that sit outside the cleaning scope. That package is what supports a capital request or an insurer question later.
Rare Earth Ltd trades as Thrare Contracting, carries DBE and MBE certification, meets the small disadvantaged business definition, and is registered in SAM.gov under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 with CAGE code 9JAV8. No HUBZone certification, 8(a) participation or SOC 2 attestation is held or claimed.
Send the number of buildings, a site plan or the trough footage if you have it, and whether the address falls inside the Marietta city limits or in unincorporated Cobb. Rare Earth Ltd works Marietta and Cobb County out of Atlanta.