Ask The Engineer "gutter Covers Vs Cleaning The Gutters?"

When you see the ad promoting gutter covers to end your gutter cleaning chores, think twice. In fact don't think; do research. Leaf guards can range in price from a few hundred dollars upwards to thousands.

Since most gutter covers are known for poor performance, it might make more sense to contract a gutter cleaning service several times a year for between $75 to $100 or so. And if indeed you can find a reputable insured company that will service you it's probably the best way to go. However, that may be a big challenge; for cleaning your gutters or having someone do it, may not be the right answer. Why? Answer: There are several reasons:

1. Not all gutter cleaners do a good job. Three days after Rosemary spent $75 to have her gutters cleaned, it rained and they overflowed. Did enough leaves fall to clog the gutter in three days or did the contractor do a bad job? Answer: No way to tell.

2. Joe had his gutters cleaned and the fellow he hired didn't have any insurance. Big problem! The fellow fell from the roof and sued Joe; and Joe went through a nightmare with his insurance company and the fellow's doctors.

3. Claire contracted a company for $75.00 to clean her gutters and was charged $350. The company claimed she needed a new drop tube, a couple end caps, and a few elbows and charged her a fortune for each.

4. Jim always cleaned his gutters until his ladder slipped and he ended up falling through his living room bay window and ended up in the hospital with a broken pelvis.

Yes, to avoid these issues, it looks like the smart thing to do is install a gutter protector with a promise to solve clogged gutter problems. But buyer be ware. If you choose the wrong product it can also be nightmarish with flooded basements, mildew, mold, soil erosion, and worse yet the be totally dependent on the installing company as you can no longer access your own gutters to clean them.

So let's do some research. Basically there are six different types of gutter protection devices:

1. Screening devices which are not really recognized as gutter protection devices. Made of wire, metal, or plastic, they work simply with gravity and require routine ladder maintenance.

2. Filters, membranes, and brushes installed in or on existing gutters. Basically they are not any more effective than screens and require routine ladder maintenance.

3. Fin type with rounded front nose and solid flat top. Their advertising graphics lead you to believe that debris is jettisoned off onto the ground when instead in medium-to-high debris areas enough debris sticks to the surface to clog the gutters. Here you have to depend on the installing company for service. See resource box for photos.

4. Fin type with trough and rounded front nose with solid top. Being that type fin type fails, the inventors of these products added a trough under the fin. But it doesn't take an MIT graduate to see that debris that goes into the trough (basic screening system) will either clog the trough or break down and pass into the gutter and clog it. See resource box for photos.

5. Flipping type gutter or rain dispersal units. These require ripping off your gutters and installing either fins for dispersing the water or a gutter with a hinge that gets flipped. They both look viable until you see them work. Debris lays on top the dispersal unit and it doesn't work in slow rainfall. The flip clean gutter requires a rain coat for when the gutter is full of putrid debris. The flip clean gutters are also known to warp rendering them useless.

6. Rounded front nose with vertical louvered water collectors and a flat solid top. This gutter guard limits the size and the amount of debris that can enter the gutter rather than letting in full sized leaves as with the fin type of gutter cover. This gutter guard is the only rounded nose type that limits the amount of debris or size of debris that can pass into the gutter.

This one system has proved that gutters can stay free flowing in heavy debris conditions for twenty years; and that's no small feat. The only maintenance required is to clean the louvers that can be blocked by debris.

But there's a huge difference, instead of needing to go up a ladder to do any cleaning, it can easily be done from the ground using a telescopic pole and brush. Since the blockage is visible, there's no guessing where to brush. No rain coats are required (as might be with the flip type gutter) to do this simple task as it can actually be done dressed in a suit and tie.

Isn't telling someone who has to clean his gutters several times during the fall that no maintenance is ever required like asking him to believe in Santa Claus?