Soft washingin Pompano Beach, FL.

Garden Isles is about 1,600 single-family homes east of Cypress Road and south of Atlantic Boulevard, mostly built in the 1960s, and more than half sit on canals that run out to the Intracoastal. Salt carried off the water settles on the back walls, the pool cage and the dock-side railings. It is fine and grey, it holds dust to the surface, and it keeps the wall damp longer after dew.

The soft wash takes the salt film and any algae off together at low pressure, so nothing is forced behind trim or into the seams of old block. On aluminum cage frames, washing the salt off is worth doing on its own, because salt left on the metal is what starts the white pitting. The rinse is kept on the lawn side rather than sent straight into the canal.

Pompano's OASIS system has run reclaimed irrigation water through purple pipes since 1989, and more than a thousand single-family homes are connected. Reuse customers may water any day of the week, outside the hours of 10am to 4pm, which is more often than the two days a week the county allows on drinking water.

Reclaimed water is treated for irrigation, but some nitrogen and phosphorus remain, and that feeds algae wherever a head throws water on the stucco. The result is a green fan shape low on the wall, lined up with the sprinkler. The soft wash kills it. Turning or lowering the head so it waters the bed and not the house is what keeps it from coming back, and it is the cheapest fix there is.

Cresthaven dates to 1956, when it was a winter retreat of two-bedroom bungalows, and many of those houses have since been expanded into three and four bedroom ranches. On a lot of them you can see where the original block meets a later addition, sometimes with a different stucco texture or paint age on each side.

Those seams and patches take water and algae differently from the wall around them, so the house can look blotchy even when it is not especially dirty. The soft wash cleans the whole elevation evenly at low pressure without opening up the joints. Every side is walked first, and any cracked seam or chalking paint is pointed out before the solution goes on. Cresthaven sits about a mile from the ocean, so the salt is lighter than on the canals but still there.