Building exterior cleaning in New York, scheduled around the permit

Where we work in New York

We serve New York, New York City, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Staten Island, Long Island, Westchester County, Hudson Valley, Buffalo, Rochester, Albany. Inside the five boroughs the city permit process above governs every drone flight. In Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester and the Hudson Valley the city permit does not apply, but the airspace around JFK, LaGuardia and Newark still does, along with each municipality's own rules, and we confirm all of it at the site survey before quoting a flight day. Buffalo, Rochester and Albany are named as metros we serve without a documented project there yet. Crews and equipment mobilize anywhere in the United States, with travel built into a fixed quote after a free site survey.

We do not publish a New York street address or a local phone number. Every New York request comes through the national line or the form above and is routed to the crew that mobilizes for your job.

The New York working season

Water-based washing runs roughly mid-April through mid-November; the state's average first freeze is around November 20 and the last in early April.

Drone washing is water work, and water that runs down a facade in freezing weather becomes ice on the sidewalk below, so we do not run water-based washing once overnight temperatures sit near freezing. The dates above are averages, checked against the forecast rather than the calendar. New York's season is long compared with some other states, but the permit lead time in New York City eats into it: a flight that needs 30 days of city notice and possibly up to about 90 days of FAA processing has to be applied for while the ground is still cold if it is going to happen in spring.

For a board or a managing agent, that means planning drone work a season ahead: decide in winter, file in late winter, fly in spring or summer. Water-fed pole and ground-crew work does not carry the permit lead time and can be scheduled with more flexibility inside the same window, which is why most New York City proposals combine the two.

The buildings we see in New York

New York City's exterior maintenance runs on the Facade Inspection and Safety Program, the inspection cycle most owners still call Local Law 11. Every cycle, a qualified exterior wall inspector has to see the facade, and a facade under decades of soot and biological staining is harder to read than a clean one. Boards that clean ahead of the inspection give the engineer a clear view of the masonry and the joints, and they usually find that the cleaning itself was the least expensive line on the FISP budget. We schedule around your inspection date and coordinate with your engineer on scope.

The customer is most often a co-op or condominium board and its managing agent. Boards need a written scope, a fixed price, a certificate of insurance and a plan that keeps the lobby and the sidewalk open, and they need it all in writing before a vote. Our proposals are built for that: which elevations are drone work and which are pole or ground work, when the permit applications go in, how the wash water is handled and what the building staff needs to do on the day.

Landmarked buildings and historic districts are a large share of the pre-war stock in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Brick, limestone, brownstone and terra cotta all respond well to low-pressure soft washing, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission permit that governs the work caps pressure at a level soft washing already sits under. Alongside these,we also see post-war glass and brick towers, flat commercial roofs with setbacks, rooftop solar, and parking structures in the outer boroughs, Long Island and Upstate New York.

New York questions

More general answers are on the national FAQ. See every state on the states directory.