Soft-Wash Roof Cleaning & Pressure Washing in Boca Raton, FL

Boca Raton's Surfaces Need Special Attention

Boca Raton is two cleaning problems wearing one name. East of the Intracoastal and around the Golden Triangle: single-story homes from the late fifties and sixties, low-slope roof sections, rough stucco, salt air. West of I-95 out toward the Turnpike: late-eighties and nineties country-club villages, barrel and flat tile, paver drives, screened pool decks, and an HOA structure with more layers than most people realize they signed up for. Boca Del Mar, Mission Bay and Loggers' Run cover a great deal of that ground. More than ninety percent of the city's housing went up after 1960, so almost nothing here was built with modern coatings.

We work throughout Boca Raton, from Old Floresta and Camino Gardens to Broken Sound, Woodfield, Boca West, St. Andrews, Mission Bay and Loggers' Run. HOA and commercial properties welcome.

BeforeAfter

Barrel tile on a Boca Raton pool home. The terracotta color was under the algae the whole time. Low pressure and chemistry, no wand.

Why Boca Raton roofs get dirty faster than the house next door

The black streaking on a Boca roof is Gloeocapsa magma, a cyanobacteria rather than mold or dirt. It arrives airborne, settles on a roof plane that stays damp, and feeds on the limestone filler in shingle and the porous surface of concrete tile. Three things about Boca accelerate it, and which one applies depends on how far west you live.

Golf course frontage. Boca has an unusual concentration of it. Boca West alone runs four eighteen-hole courses, and Broken Sound, Woodfield, St. Andrews, Boca Pointe, Stonebridge and Boca Woods all wrap homes around fairways and irrigation lakes. A course is watered heavily overnight and holds that humidity at ground level until mid-morning. The planes facing the fairway and the lake streak first, and it repeats down the whole street.

Hedges and canopy at close range. Boca is a hedged city. Ficus benjamina hedges run right up against the wall on thousands of properties, and where they do not you get black olive, gumbo limbo, banyan and live oak over the same tile for thirty years. Shaded tile never fully dries, and those species drop fruit and tannin that stain concrete a rust-brown most homeowners assume is permanent. It is not, but it does not come off with pressure.

Roof type. Barrel and S-tile hold water in the pan that a shingle roof sheds. East Boca adds the mid-century inheritance: low-slope sections in modified bitumen or built-up membrane, which drain slowly by design and grow a dark film people mistake for a failing roof.

We treat with a low-pressure application and let the chemistry do the work. Soft washing a roof runs under 500 PSI; a pressure washer runs 1,500 to 3,500. On tile that strips the glaze and the color coat and drives water under the flashing. On modified bitumen it takes the granules off the cap sheet and opens the seams. Either way you are calling a roofer instead of a cleaner, and on most systems you voided the warranty.

BeforeAfter

A Boca Raton estate roof partway through a soft wash, with half the plane still untreated. Same tile, same sun, same age — the difference is the treatment.

Your landscaping is protected before anything is applied

Where there are gutters, the solution is captured at the downspout into collection bags, so it never reaches the beds. Where there are not, we tarp the property and a ground technician wets everything down ahead of the work: plants, walls, windows, anywhere wind could carry mist.

Flowering plants get tarped either way. Bougainvillea, hibiscus and orchids are sensitive enough that we cover them even when gutters would have handled the runoff. In Boca we add one more as a matter of course: a mature ficus hedge tight against the house. It is the most expensive thing on the property line, it is already under stress from whitefly, and it sits directly in the drift path.

While the roof is washed the ground technician stays on the ground, working ahead of the drift. That is the whole reason there are two of us on a roof job.

Honeydew, the Boca Raton problem nobody warns you about

That sticky black film on your stucco, pool deck, screen cage and car is very often not mold in the ordinary sense and not algae. It is sooty mold growing on insect excrement. Whiteflies and scale feed on your hedge or your tree and drip a sweet byproduct called honeydew; it falls on whatever is underneath, and sooty mold grows on it. Leaves, cars, pool decks, sidewalks: anything under an infested tree goes sticky and black.

The main offender is the rugose spiraling whitefly, Aleurodicus rugioperculatus, first reported in Florida from Miami-Dade County in 2009 and now established across Palm Beach County. Palms take about a fifth of documented infestations, with gumbo limbo, avocado, black olive and mango most of the rest — all common Boca yard and street trees. It leaves a cottony wax and white spiral egg deposits on leaf undersides, which is how you identify it from the ground.

A lot of people have this backwards. The ficus whitefly, Singhiella simplex, the one that killed miles of Ficus benjamina hedge across South Florida, is not the one staining your wall. It does not produce significant honeydew, so it does not produce sooty mold. Thinning, yellow-streaked hedge is ficus whitefly. Black tacky wall and deck, look up at the palms instead.

That changes the cleaning. Honeydew is a sugar residue rather than a biological stain, and chlorine alone does not lift it well. It wants a surfactant step first, then the biocide, then a rinse. Pressure alone just smears it into the stucco texture and leaves a gray shadow.

And the part we tell you before you book rather than after: if the insect is still active, the film comes back. Cleaning the wall does not treat the tree, and fungicide does not help either, because the fungus is the symptom. We will tell you which plant it is coming off, but stopping it needs a pest program on that plant. This runs the whole South Florida coast; it is on the Boca page because the density of ficus hedging and mature gumbo limbo here makes it the thing we are most often called about that the homeowner has misdiagnosed.

Driveways, pavers and sealing

Concrete, on the fifties and sixties east Boca houses and the older central subdivisions, cleans on a rotary surface cleaner, which gives an even finish instead of zebra striping. Anyone cleaning your driveway freehand with a wand is leaving you stripes you will see for two years.

Brick pavers are on nearly every country-club-era build. They clean beautifully, and the joint sand comes out with the dirt. That is physics, not damage. We tell you before we start whether re-sanding is in your quote or priced separately.

Travertine and marble turn up on the estate tier and the east Boca waterfront streets. They are soft, acid-sensitive and easy to ruin, so they get a neutral-pH clean. Never acid, never high pressure.

Sealing is a separate conversation from cleaning. A sealed paver driveway holds its color, resists tannin staining from black olive and oak, and keeps joint sand in place through storm season. It has to go down on a fully cured, fully dry surface, which here means watching the forecast rather than the calendar.

House washing

Most of Boca is CBS block with a stucco finish over it, painted with an elastomeric or acrylic coating. That gets soft washed: low pressure, solution, rinse. High pressure on stucco forces water behind the finish, and you find out six months later when the paint blisters.

The original 1920s stucco in Old Floresta is a different animal. Those houses were built with a deliberately rough-finished stucco, and that texture is the architecture. It holds dirt in a way smooth stucco does not, and it does not tolerate being blasted. The answer is dwell time and the right dilution, not more pressure.

What we watch for on a Boca house wash: soffit vents, because water driven up into a vent ends up in your attic; light fixtures and outlets; and the north and east walls, where the mildew lives. The street-facing wall usually looks fine. It is the shaded side, the wall behind the pool cage, and the twelve inches of stucco behind the hedge that are green.

East of the Intracoastal, add salt. Salt film holds moisture against painted aluminum, window frames and garage doors and accelerates chalking of the paint underneath. On A1A that is a rinse-frequency question more than a cleaning one, and it falls away quickly inland.

Pool decks, patios and screen enclosures

Almost every Boca home west of Federal Highway has a screen cage, and the cage is why the deck looks the way it does. Enclosures cut airflow and hold moisture, so the deck grows a thin biofilm that is slick before it is visibly dirty. If your deck is slippery after rain, that is algae, and it is a fall risk.

Boca pool decks come in Kool Deck, pavers, travertine and stamped concrete. Kool Deck is the one people wreck. It is a thin textured topping and pressure lifts it off in sheets, so it gets soft washed, full stop.

We clean the cage frame and screens as well. Aluminum frame oxidizes into a chalky gray film, worse the closer you are to the ocean. Under a whitefly-affected canopy the screen also collects honeydew, which is why some cages darken on the top panels first.

Sidewalks, swales and the letters that actually arrive

Boca Raton's code requires that exterior property and premises be maintained in a clean, safe and sanitary condition. Swale maintenance and sanitation of exterior property both appear on the city's own list of common code violations. The swale is the drainage cut between sidewalk and street. It collects silt, it grows, and it is the first thing a drive-by inspection notices.

In practice most Boca homeowners hear from their association long before the city, and here the association is frequently two associations. The country-club communities run a two-tier structure that catches new owners off guard. Broken Sound is roughly 1,600 homes across twenty-seven villages, each with its own HOA. Woodfield Country Club is about 1,297 homes across twenty villages, each with its own sub-association, fees and architectural guidelines. Boca West runs more than fifty villages, The Polo Club more than twenty. The roof-cleaning schedule, the driveway standard and the appearance committee that writes you the letter sit at the village level, not the master level, and the deadline is the village's.

If a letter is what brought you to this page, say so when you call. We respond to every estimate request within 24 hours, and a deadline changes how we schedule rather than what we charge.

Which rulebook your address actually falls under

Boca has been deliberate about how it looks since the beginning. Addison Mizner's development company announced Old Floresta in October 1925, and twenty-nine of his Spanish Colonial Revival houses were built there: rough-finished stucco, wrought iron balconies, barrel tile roofs. In 1990 it became the city's first historic district, and the instinct never went away. The development code governs the size and type of commercial buildings, signs and advertisements closely enough that you will not find a billboard on a Boca thoroughfare.

The city runs a Community Appearance Board under Chapter 2, Article III, Division 4 of the code. It reviews aesthetic standards for site development, building alterations, exterior spaces and landscaping within the corporate limits, and meets twice a month. If you own commercial property inside the city, it is a real part of your life.

Two corrections, because the assumption runs wrong in both directions. Single-family and two-family homes are exempt from the paint color permit requirement — nobody at the city is reviewing the color of your house. And a Boca Raton mailing address does not necessarily put you in the city at all. The city is about thirty square miles, and a great many Boca Raton addresses sit in unincorporated Palm Beach County: most of what people call West Boca, and some communities closer in. Boca West is unincorporated. St. Andrews Country Club weighed annexation, declined, and stayed in the county.

Inside the city limits, city code enforcement and the city's exterior maintenance standard apply to you. Outside them, county code applies and your village association is your regulator. Either way the association's letter usually arrives first. Tell us which you are dealing with and we will schedule to that deadline.

Commercial, sports courts and post-construction

Boca supports more jobs than it has residents. We handle plazas, medical and professional offices, restaurant patios and HOA clubhouses along Glades Road, Federal Highway, Palmetto Park Road, Yamato Road and Congress Avenue, in the office parks around Broken Sound Boulevard and Park of Commerce Drive, and downtown around Mizner Park and Royal Palm Place.

Commercial work is scheduled after hours so the lot is empty and nothing is dripping near a customer, or on a standing semiannual schedule so it is handled without anyone having to remember to call. Restaurant patios and dumpster pads are their own problem: grease rather than algae, wanting a degreaser and hot water, not a stronger biocide.

Sports courts at community clubhouses are their own job. A tennis, pickleball or basketball court is an acrylic coating over a slab and the coating is the entire asset, so high pressure lifts it. Courts want soft washing about every six months, and algae on a court is a traction question, not a looks question.

Post-construction covers new builds and the teardown-and-rebuild volume in east Boca: the dust, mortar splatter and adhesive a builder's final clean misses.

Communities we work in Boca Raton

Old Floresta, Camino Gardens, Boca Villas, Golden Triangle, Boca Raton Riviera, Spanish River Land, Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club, The Sanctuary, Por La Mar, Golden Harbour, Sun & Surf, Bel Marra, Royal Oak Hills, Boca Square, Boca Raton Hills, Winfield Park, Broken Sound, Woodfield Country Club, Woodfield Hunt Club, Bocaire, Boca Grove, Boca West, Boca Pointe, Boca Del Mar, St. Andrews Country Club, The Polo Club, Stonebridge, Boca Lago, Boca Woods, Boca Greens, Boca Country Club, Mission Bay and Loggers' Run.

If your community is not on that list, call and ask.

When to schedule

October through December is the right window for most Boca properties. Dry season is starting, the surface stays clean longer, and you are ahead of the months when the city fills up and every gate, guardhouse and club calendar gets busy. January through March, Boca is at capacity and a harder place to move a truck through.

On tile here, roofs run roughly every eighteen to twenty-four months. Golf-course frontage, lakefront and north-facing slopes run closer to twelve to eighteen. Driveways and pool decks go annually, or every six months under heavy canopy or an active whitefly hedge. Sports courts, every six months. Oceanfront properties want a more frequent rinse, because of salt.

BeforeAfter

Heavy algae on a Boca Raton tile roof, restored in a single visit. On tile here that holds eighteen to twenty-four months, less on a fairway or lakefront slope.