Fleet washing in Sanford
On a fleet yard the vehicles are the job. Two Sanford documents add questions about everything else on the parcel. Inside the City's local historic districts, an ordinance governs how structures are cleaned, so the shop out back comes under a cleaning rule written for structures. And new development in the City's service area must run a dual distribution system, with irrigation on a meter of its own. Neither document names a truck wash. Both are worth knowing before the first one.
Inside a historic district, the buildings on your yard come under a cleaning rule of their own
Inside any of Sanford's four local historic districts (our Sanford page lists them), Schedule S §11.0 B.1 calls cleaning methods "that could damage the historic building materials", "any abrasive, corrosive, or damaging techniques" among them, "prohibited and unlawful". The section states its own subject as the maintenance of historic landmarks and properties within established historic districts, and B.1's opening sentence is about "the surface cleaning of structures"; vehicles are not what B.1 names. We are fully mobile and work at your yard, so on a yard inside one of those boundaries one visit can hold two kinds of surface: the units, where the finish maker's instructions apply, and the shop and the office, which are structures, the word B.1 opens on. Whether it reaches anything else on the parcel is the City's to say, not ours. If your yard is inside a district, tell us when you ask for the quote: the shop and the office are a different question from the units.
New development here carries a second water system, on a meter of its own
We connect to your spigot and fill a large onboard reserve, so a unit either arrives full or draws from your water while we work. That is a yes-or-no question: is there a water point we can use. On some Sanford parcels there may also be an irrigation meter beside the domestic one: that follows from the reclaimed-water rule set out on our Sanford page, which applies where the City has made reclaimed water available and to new development in its service area, not to every address in town. The City's Water Conservation Plan adds that the Utilities Manual, which requires a reclaimed irrigation system to serve a development's landscaped areas, has been approved as the Land Development Regulations, so that requirement is code rather than intention. What it means for a wash is small and specific. We have not found a source that says how an outdoor water point on a Sanford site is marked or which system it belongs to, so if you know which meter the one you hand us sits on, tell us. The Plan names surface water among the alternative irrigation supplies, and for a sense of what that can mean here: the USGS gage on the St. Johns River near Sanford published 57 monthly mean specific conductance values ranging from 361.1 to 2,373 microsiemens per centimetre, and annual means of 1,396 for 2001 and 880.9 for 2015. That is a historical series — the daily record for the parameter ended in September 2016 — and all it establishes is that the river water here is mineralised. It does not say your yard draws from the river, and we will not tell you what it would do to a finish, because nothing we have read says that.
The City's watering rule is about landscape irrigation. What sets our hours is the metal
Sanford has watering restrictions, and it is worth reading what they cover. The City Commission adopted the St. Johns River Water Management District landscape irrigation rules in April 2010: one day a week in winter, two days a week in summer. The scope the City published alongside them says the ordinance applies to landscape irrigation regardless of whether the water comes from ground or surface water, from a private well or pump, and that it does not apply to reclaimed water. That summary is about irrigation and does not mention vehicle washing either way; we are not the office that decides what that means for a yard. The City publishes those rules on its water conservation page, and the City is where to put the question for a specific address. What does set our hours is the metal, and no city wrote it: the guide for finished aluminium, written for building metal rather than for trucks, rules out chemically cleaning hot, sun-heated metal, and Alcoa's guide for its surface-treated wheels wants them cooled first; our fleet washing page has the detail. That does not change from yard to yard, which is why we typically run nights and weekends, around your route schedule.
Common questions
- Our shop is in a historic district. Do we need a Certificate of Appropriateness before you wash the building?
- We do not know, and we will not guess in either direction. The City's page says one is required for any exterior work, including repairs, in the Downtown Commercial, Sanford Avenue and Residential districts; in Georgetown Residential the same page says one is required for demolition and new construction, and names nothing else. Schedule S §8.0's own trigger list does not name cleaning, and §11.0 preserves ordinary maintenance that changes no design, material, colour or appearance. The City's page and Schedule S pull opposite ways, so the question goes to the City's Historic Preservation Officer, the employee Schedule S charges with assisting the Historic Preservation Board, which meets monthly. That question is about the building. Whether the City's "exterior work" wording reaches a truck wash on a parcel inside a district is not something we have read an answer to either, so put the whole job to the City, not only the shop. The cleaning-method sentence in §11.0 B.1 is a separate matter, and it is in Schedule S as quoted above.
- Where does the wash water go at our yard?
- Wherever your site already sends it, and the walkthrough is where that gets established. Knowing where the water goes is not the same as capturing it: we do not collect and haul wash water, and a yard whose lease or permit requires that needs a contractor equipped for it (our fleet washing page has the detail). We also went looking for a City rule on wash-water discharge and could not read one either way, so we will not tell you Sanford has such an ordinance and we will not tell you it does not. The City answers that for your address.
- We keep units at more than one address in town. Can you split it up?
- We are flexible to what your contract needs. What does not travel between addresses is the site answer: whether that parcel falls inside a historic district, which meter the usable water point is on, where that particular lot drains. Those are three questions with a different answer at each address.
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