Exterior Painting
If you are painting your home in the exact same scheme, with not changes, then you will not need ARC approval. If you are planning to change any element, even just the color of the front door, you will need approval from the ARC committee. Dunn Edwards has the approved paint palette for Hidden Canyon. By clicking the link below, you will be taken to the Hidden Canyon page at Dunn Edwards where you can find your existing paint palette, get samples and order paint.
Exterior Lights
Hidden Canyon has no traditional streetlights and instead relies upon the gas lamps and coach lights on the community homes to keep the sidewalks illuminated at night. The gas lamps and coach lights are required to be kept with the original light fixtures whenever possible and in the same color schemes to create a consistent look throughout the community. In the case of a lamp or light being damaged beyond repair, then the ARC committee will supply a list of approved lamps and lights. Every gas lamp pole is required to have a cross bar.
Community Lift Station
Hidden Canyon is a community that relies on a lift station. Because of this, we must be very diligent about what we put down our drains and how we drain the pools in the community. The highest elevation in our community is on the East side along Sandy Ridge with the lowest on the Northwest corner. When the community was developed, the builders followed the natural elevation drop for house pads and sewage flow and then installed a lift station in Northwest corner to collect the community sewage and then pump it back up to the sanitary sewer on Sandy Ridge. To do this everything that we flush, wash, or dump down our drains flows down and collects in the lift station tank, or wet well, it then goes through a grinder pump and is literally pushed uphill through a 2-inch line to the community sewer tie-in on Sandy Ridge. This system works fine so long as we don’t push things down the drain like beach towels, (don’t laugh we have had a beach towel in the system), children’s toys and most commonly plastic products that are meant to be thrown in the trash. Another problem we have is when a pool is drained using a high-capacity pump and a 2-inch hose, this overloads the system and leads to emergency pump out. The approved pool draining system is covered in a separate heading but suffice it to say we need to treat our lift station with care, or it will treat us to a very smelly, disgusting and expensive problem.
Pool Draining Guidelines
By law, pools must be drained into the sanitary sewer system for the water to be recycled and because our community relies on a lift station, we have guidelines on just how fast that water can be drained. When our wet well becomes overwhelmed by a pool dump it creates an emergency pumping situation where a pumping/transfer truck must come into the community, pump out the excess effluent and then transfer it to the water treatment plant. When this has happened in the past it has created an additional cost for the community ranging between $4,000 and $6,000, so please adhere to the pool draining guidelines or fines, increased assessment costs and the possibility of special assessments may be necessary.
If you use a high-capacity pump (greater than 1/3 HP) with a 1-inch line or larger (typically what are used by pool services and what are available from rental companies are 2/3 HP with 2-inch lines), you must only run the pump in 30-minute increments, followed by 30 minutes of not running the pump. In other words, 30-minutes on/30-minutes off.
The easiest method is to use a lower capacity pump with a ¾-inch line (typical garden hose size).
If you are using a 1/3 HP submersible pump with a garden hose, you can let the pump run continuously until your pool is drained to the desired level.
Homeowners are responsible for informing any pool service personnel they have hired.
Not adhering to the pool draining guidelines will result in fines up to the cost of any emergency services required by non-compliance.
A 1/3 HP pump is available to borrow from the community if needed. Please follow the link below to request it.
Community Standards
The standards page is designed to give you information about what you need to do in order to be in compliance with the governing rules of the Hidden Canyon CC&R’s. Some items like not parking for longer than 24 hours on the streets, speed limit, gate access and pet procedures were covered on the first page, but things like our pool draining guidelines, exterior lighting, exterior painting and many others will have information here. When you bought your home you were provided with a stack of documents called the resale package that contained the CC&R’s and Rules Regulations of the community. We highly recommend you refer to those documents before making any alterations to the exterior of your home or landscaping. A good rule of thumb is that if it can be seen from the street or by a neighbor, odds are it’s going to require approval to be altered or added by the Architectural Review Committee (ARC) and because we have a master HOA as well, you will need to submit an ARC form for approval to Sunridge as well.