Pressure washing in Branford, Connecticut.

Local conditions

Granite, salt air, and a lot of old summer housing.

Branford sits on Long Island Sound roughly five miles east of New Haven, and its shoreline is unusually broken. Off Stony Creek lie the Thimble Islands, an archipelago of pink granite outcrops ranging from bare ledges to islands several acres across. They act as a natural breakwater for the mainland behind them.

The housing along that shore is largely inherited from the resort era. Stony Creek grew as a nineteenth century summer resort and granite quarrying village, and its historic district holds a dense run of architecture from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. Much of it is painted wood that has stood in salt air for well over a century.

That is the whole argument for soft washing in this town. Old painted clapboard and shingle carrying decades of salt film will not survive high pressure, and high pressure does not clean it faster anyway. Inland from the shore the tree cover thickens and the work moves to roofs and gutters.