Roof drainage maintenance for organizations that own or manage buildings inside the Roswell city limits. Rare Earth Ltd works from Atlanta and covers Roswell as a service area.
Roswell gutter cleaning is sold to organizations, never to households. The signers are apartment and condominium communities, homeowner associations and the third party firms that manage them, office and retail landlords along Mansell Road and Holcomb Bridge Road, schools, houses of worship, and public agencies holding buildings inside the city. Portfolio accounts work because one mobilization reaches a dozen roofs, the scope recurs against a budget line the property already funds, and the person signing wants an inspection record instead of an assurance.
Rare Earth Ltd does not clean gutters for single family homeowners anywhere in North Fulton County. Pressure washing is the only service Rare Earth Ltd sells into a household. A Roswell homeowner with a clogged trough will get a faster answer from a residential specialist, and printing that here saves a call on both ends.
Rare Earth Ltd trades as Thrare Contracting and carries DBE and MBE certification, meets the small disadvantaged business definition, and appears in SAM under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 with CAGE code 9JAV8. A procurement officer or a corporate supplier diversity desk can confirm every one of those in a public database without contacting the company. HUBZone status, 8(a) status and SOC 2 attestation are not held, and are not claimed.
Roswell writes and enforces its own illicit discharge ordinance, and that ordinance states its own reach. City of Roswell Code of Ordinances, Chapter 7, Article 7.5, Section 7.5.1.2 reads: "The provisions of this ordinance shall apply throughout the City of Roswell." Fulton County's stormwater program governs unincorporated Fulton County, so a Roswell address answers to the City ordinance rather than to a county rule. Any vendor who quotes a Fulton County code section for a building inside the Roswell city limits has cited the wrong government.
Section 7.5.3.1(a) 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 municipal separate storm sewer system any pollutants or waters containing any pollutants, other than stormwater." The exempt list in Section 7.5.3.1(b) covers water line flushing by a government agency, landscape irrigation, rising ground water, air conditioning condensation and "any other water source not containing pollutants." Gutter rinse water is not on that list.
The definitions section decides the question before anyone argues it. Section 7.5.2 defines a non-stormwater discharge as "any discharge to the storm drain system that is not composed entirely of stormwater," and its definition of a pollutant names, among other things, "detergents (biodegradable or otherwise)," yard wastes, floatables, and sediment. Gutter sludge sluiced toward a catch basin is therefore two listed pollutants and a non-stormwater discharge at the same time, whatever the cleaner label says about being safe for plants.
Roswell also publishes what a violation costs. Section 7.5.7.6 authorizes a civil penalty of "no less than $1,000.00 (depending on the severity of the violation) for each day the violation remains unremedied after receipt of the notice of violation," and Section 7.5.7.7 allows a citation to municipal court carrying a fine up to $1,000.00 or 60 days, with each day treated as a separate offense. The penalty attaches to the property owner as readily as to the contractor, which is why the containment method belongs in the scope of work rather than in a vendor's private habits.
Two more parts of Article 7.5 change how a job is run rather than how it is priced. Section 7.5.5 lets the City "enter and inspect properties and facilities at reasonable times as often as may be necessary," obliges a gated or badged property to arrange that access, and states that unreasonable delay in granting it is itself a violation. Section 7.5.6 requires anyone responsible for a release of pollutants to contain and clean it up, notify the City within 24 hours, confirm in writing within three business days, and, if the release came from a commercial or industrial establishment, keep an on site written record of the discharge and the actions taken.
Background on the federal layer underneath all of this sits on the hub: how the Clean Water Act and Georgia EPD frame wash water.
The City draws a hard line between public and private drainage, and the line runs closer to the building than most managers expect. Roswell's Stormwater Services Extent of Service and Level of Service fact sheet lists private driveway culvert pipes, drainage swales with and without easements, detention ponds, pond outlets and drainage system extensions as privately maintained. The City maintains the public drainage system in streets, rights of way and on public property.
The level of service statement is the part worth reading twice. On the public system the City "provides inspections and prioritizes and makes necessary repairs." On private systems the City "provides regulatory enforcement and may provide emergency response in isolated instances." A buried line running from an apartment building's downspout to a parking lot inlet is a private drainage system. Calling the City about it produces a determination and, if something is wrong, an enforcement instrument. It does not produce a repair crew.
Roswell staffs a Drainage System Investigator who inspects the public system and decides, case by case, whether a given structure is public or private. The City's own stormwater utility page states that the resulting work order list for the maintenance crew "is currently backlogged approximately 9 months." For a property manager the practical consequence is straightforward: the drainage a community controls is the drainage a community maintains, and the cheapest point in that whole run to intervene is the trough at the roof edge.
This is also why a gutter cleaning close out is worth more in Roswell than a clean gutter alone. A flow test that pushes water through a downspout and out at a known discharge point tells an owner the private line is open. A flow test that produces a backup at the shoe tells the owner the private line is not open, in writing, on a dated report, before a storm makes the same discovery in a resident's breezeway.
Roswell has charged a stormwater utility fee since 2011, billed through the monthly sanitation and utility statement, and it funds replacement and repair of the City's aging stormwater infrastructure. The fee is calculated on impervious surface area, and the City lists rooftops first among the impervious surfaces it counts, alongside driveways, sidewalks, patios, parking lots and storage sheds.
Residential parcels fall into four rate tiers based on impervious area. Commercial parcels do not use tiers at all. The City states that "commercial properties will receive a bill based on their actual impervious surface area," measured from aerial photographs and maps the City already holds. An apartment or office owner in Roswell is therefore paying a recurring municipal charge that is calculated, in part, from the square footage of the roof planes those gutters serve.
That framing settles an argument that comes up in HOA and asset management budget meetings every year. Roof drainage is not a discretionary appearance item in Roswell. It is the maintenance side of an asset the City has already measured, already billed, and already regulates by ordinance. A reduction in the fee, where one is available at all, runs through the City's Stormwater Utility Credit Manual rather than through anything a cleaning vendor sells.
The 1991 to 2020 twelve monthly precipitation normals for the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson station sum to 50.43 inches, against a separately published annual normal of 49.71 inches (National Centers for Environmental Information, NOAA, U.S. Monthly Climate Normals 1991-2020, station USW00013874, read 2026-08-31). That figure is the design load every roof drainage system in North Fulton County works against, whether or not anyone has looked at the gutters this decade.
Rain converts at 0.623 gallons per square foot per inch. Multiply that by the 50.43 inch normal and each square foot of roof plane sheds about 31.4 gallons in a year. A Roswell garden apartment building with a 6,400 square foot roof footprint therefore moves roughly 201,000 gallons annually. Across a 14 building community the same arithmetic reaches about 2.8 million gallons, all of it routed through sheet metal and downspouts that cost a small fraction of one roof replacement to keep open.
Averages are not what breaks a building, which is the operational point. A single North Georgia thunderstorm delivers a large share of a month's total in well under an hour. A trough with four inches of compacted needle mat in it handles an ordinary week without complaint and overtops in that hour, and the water then finds fascia, soffit, sheathing and the wall assembly below. Gutter scheduling is set against the storm, not against the annual figure.
Roswell operates under an NPDES Phase I permit and belongs to the 15-county Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District, and the City publishes the condition of the streams it drains to. Per the City of Roswell Watershed Protection page, the Big Creek, Hog Waller Creek and Foe Killer Creek watersheds inside the city are listed as not supporting their designated use. Rocky Creek and Willeo Creek are partially supporting.
The City attributes those listings to elevated bacteria, specifically fecal coliform, which it links to sewer overflows, failing septic systems, animal waste and urban runoff. That matters to a gutter contractor for an unglamorous reason. Standing water in a neglected trough on a multifamily building collects bird and rodent droppings along with the organic mat, and the first heavy rain after a long dry spell flushes that concentrate straight into a downspout, into a private line, and into one of five named creeks the City is already being measured on.
A property sitting in an impaired watershed is not thereby in violation of anything. It is, however, a property where the City has a documented reason to look, an ordinance that authorizes it to look, and a daily penalty available if it finds something. Choosing containment over convenience on a wash down is cheap insurance in that setting.
Roswell puts its noise rules inside the nuisance article rather than in a standalone noise chapter, at City Code Section 8.8.3, subsection (s). The ordinance sets sound level limits by receiving property category, then exempts specific activities from those limits. Item 11 of the exemption list covers "noise that results from landscaping and lawn maintenance between the hours of 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m." Item 12 covers construction noise, private and commercial, in the same window.
The binding constraint on an apartment community sits further down, in the restricted uses paragraph. Section 8.8.3(s)(4)b requires commercial and industrial landscaping power tools to run with a muffler, and states that motorized equipment used in those activities "shall not be operated on a residential property or within two hundred fifty (250) feet of a residential property line, between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. on weekdays, or between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. on weekends." Almost every building in a Roswell garden apartment community sits inside 250 feet of a residential property line, so the weekend start is 9:00 a.m., not 7:00 a.m.
A separate section governs building work. City Code Section 5.1.13 makes it unlawful to conduct construction of a building or structure, movement of earth, laying of pavement, excavation, clearing or grading, or "loading or unloading material, equipment, or supplies" outside 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., Monday through Saturday, unless the chief building inspector has issued a permit for other hours. Routine gutter maintenance is not construction, but the equipment handling clause is worth knowing before anyone proposes a Sunday mobilization on a Roswell site.
Thrare Contracting schedules Roswell work to the tighter of the applicable windows: blowers and vacuums start no earlier than 7:00 a.m. on weekdays and 9:00 a.m. on weekends, and equipment is staged and loaded inside the same window. A community that requires a later start for its own reasons sets the time, and the schedule is written into the notice residents receive.
Dumpster and refuse timing runs on a third rule. Roswell's Unified Development Code, Section 12.9.4, limits dumpster collection hours to 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. in areas adjacent to residentially zoned or used properties unless the owner has built approved sound-regulating structures. Where a job's debris is going into a property dumpster, that window governs the haul off as well.
Roswell publishes two Municode products, a Code of Ordinances and a Unified Development Code, and the tree rules live in the second one. UDC Article 12, Section 12.1 requires every site subject to tree protection to maintain a minimum tree density measured in units per acre, and states plainly that "the tree density requirement must be met whether or not a site has trees prior to development." Required density varies by location under Section 12.1.5.B, and the code's own worked example runs a 2.2 acre site at 30 tree density units per acre for a total requirement of 66 units.
That example is instructive about species as well as arithmetic. It credits a site with three 14 inch pines, three 18 inch oaks, one 20 inch hickory and one 30 inch oak, reaching 45.9 protected units against the 66 required. Pines and oaks are what Roswell sites preserve because pines and oaks are what Roswell has, and mature protected specimens sit inside tree save areas that are frequently the wooded buffer immediately behind a building line. A code that requires canopy to be retained or replanted is a code that guarantees a debris source above the gutter for the life of the property.
The removal rule is the one that surprises vendors. UDC Section 12.1.1.B.3 states that no person may "remove, cause to be removed, poison, damage, trim or transplant any tree with a trunk diameter of 3 inches in diameter at breast height (DBH) which normally attains a mature height of 15 feet or more without first obtaining a permit." Trimming is named in the same breath as removal. A gutter contractor in Roswell who quietly cuts back the limb hanging over a trough has performed a permitted activity without the permit, on the client's property, in the client's name.
Two further provisions shape how overhang is handled. Section 12.1.9.A requires all pruning inside the City of Roswell to follow the ANSI A300 pruning standard, and Section 12.1.9.C prohibits topping, defined as removing more than one third of a tree's leaves and branches measured from the lowest branch to the top. Thrare Contracting does not cut trees on Roswell properties. Overhanging limbs are photographed, marked on the condition report, and referred to the property's arborist or tree contractor, who can pull the permit and prune to the standard the City names.
One exemption in Section 12.1.1.C.5 is useful to know at budget time. Removal of trees other than specimen trees from detention ponds and drainage easements is exempt from the remaining tree protection provisions where the work is necessary for the construction, maintenance or operation of those facilities, though a tree removal permit application is still required to demonstrate the exemption applies. A community clearing volunteer growth out of a detention basin is not in the same position as one clearing a wooded buffer.
Two visits a year is the base cycle: one after the hardwood drop finishes in late autumn, one after the spring pollen and seed load has run its course. Roswell properties earn a third or fourth visit for reasons a site walk can see, not for reasons a sales script asserts. Buildings tight against a preserved wooded buffer, roof planes under overhanging limbs, and sites carrying heavy pine are the three conditions that move a community up a tier.
Pine is the specific problem for any Roswell property that already bought guards. A pine needle is narrow enough to pass through screen mesh and to ride over a reverse curve nose, and wet needles interlock into a mat that holds water in the trough while looking, from the ground, like a clean gutter. The Roswell properties with the worst standing water are often the ones sold a guard system as maintenance free, because nobody has lifted the guards since the installer left.
Rather than assert an interval, the condition report sets it. Each visit records debris depth and composition per building, the flow test result at each downspout, and any standing water found. Three cycles of that record tell an owner which buildings genuinely need four visits and which are being cleaned twice for no measurable reason, which is usually a reduction in the total rather than an increase.
The metro-wide version of this reasoning sits on the hub: how debris load sets a cleaning cycle across Atlanta.
The scope runs the entire drainage path, from the roof edge down to the point where water leaves the building envelope. Debris is removed by hand into containers rather than flushed along the trough, hangers and seams are checked while the crew is at the line, every downspout is flushed and flow tested, and each buried connection on the building is tested for a backup at the shoe. Wash water and sediment stay on the property.
What comes back to the manager is the deliverable that a Roswell ordinance file actually needs: a per building record with dated photographs, debris depth and composition, downspout flow results, and a punch list separating anything found from anything cleaned.
Item by item detail is on the hub: the full trough to discharge scope for a commercial cleaning.
The reasoning behind the sequence is on the hub: the building by building method used across the metro.
Five inputs carry the price: total linear footage of gutter, story count, the access method each roof plane demands, the debris load the site actually carries, and how many visits a year the property is buying. A Roswell quote names all five, because a manager comparing two bids cannot reconcile them unless both show their inputs.
Gutter and downspout repair, fascia and soffit carpentry, roof work, excavation of a failed buried line, and any tree work sit outside the cleaning price and are quoted on their own. In Roswell the tree exclusion is a legal one as much as a commercial one, because trimming a protected tree requires a City permit under UDC Section 12.1.1.B.3.
The boundary is set out on the hub: which line items sit outside a cleaning price.
Thresholds and the general industry standard are set out on the hub: the OSHA fall protection thresholds for roof edge work.
One carve out inside that standard decides more Roswell bids than the four foot trigger does. 29 CFR 1910.28, at paragraph (a)(2)(i), states that the section does not apply "To portable ladders." On a two story walk up, which is most of the multifamily stock in Roswell, the majority of a crew's exposure is on a ladder rather than at a roof edge, so a harness inventory answers a question the site is not asking. The question that matters is how a bidder reaches each individual roof plane, building by building, and what changes when a plane cannot be reached safely.
Coverage beyond North Fulton is listed on the hub: every metro city on the gutter cleaning hub.
Thrare Contracting does not clean gutters for single family homeowners in Roswell or anywhere else. Pressure washing is the only service Rare Earth Ltd sells to a household. Gutter cleaning is sold to apartment and condominium communities, homeowner associations and their management companies, commercial landlords, and public and institutional facilities.
The City of Roswell's own ordinance governs. Section 7.5.1.2 of the Roswell Code of Ordinances states that the illicit discharge provisions "shall apply throughout the City of Roswell." Fulton County's stormwater program covers unincorporated Fulton County, so a county code section cited against a Roswell building is the wrong authority.
Not without a City permit. Roswell Unified Development Code Section 12.1.1.B.3 bars any person from removing, damaging, trimming or transplanting a tree of 3 inches diameter at breast height that normally reaches a mature height of 15 feet or more without first obtaining a permit. Thrare Contracting photographs overhanging limbs, records them on the condition report, and refers them to the property's tree contractor.
Roswell City Code Section 8.8.3(s)(4)b bars commercial motorized landscaping equipment from operating within 250 feet of a residential property line between 9:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. on weekdays and between 9:00 p.m. and 9:00 a.m. on weekends. Because nearly every building in a garden apartment community falls inside that 250 foot band, Thrare Contracting starts at 7:00 a.m. on weekdays and 9:00 a.m. on weekends.
The property owner is. Roswell's Stormwater Services Extent of Service fact sheet classifies drainage system extensions, private culverts, swales, detention ponds and pond outlets as privately maintained. On private systems the City "provides regulatory enforcement and may provide emergency response in isolated instances" rather than performing repairs.
Each visit produces a per building record: dated photographs before and after, debris depth and composition, a flow test result for every downspout and buried connection, and a written punch list of conditions found outside the cleaning scope. Three cycles of that record are what a board uses to set the visit count per building rather than for the whole property.
A Roswell quote is built from five named inputs: linear footage of gutter, number of stories, access method, debris load and visit frequency. Gutter repair, fascia and soffit carpentry, roof repair, buried line excavation and tree work are excluded from the cleaning price and quoted separately.
Rare Earth Ltd, trading as Thrare Contracting, holds DBE and MBE certification, meets the small disadvantaged business definition, and is registered in SAM under UEI Z4WKS4UE8NJ6 and CAGE code 9JAV8. Rare Earth Ltd does not hold HUBZone status, 8(a) status or a SOC 2 attestation and does not represent otherwise.
Federal and state stormwater sourcing for the whole service area: the hub source list.
Send the building count and approximate linear footage of gutter, or the site plan, and the proposal comes back with the five pricing inputs named. Covering Roswell and North Fulton County from Atlanta.