A Homeowner’s Guide to Maintaining Your Gutters

If you want to control the flow of water around your home, getting gutters is a great way to do it. Are gutters needed, you might ask. They are not essential, but they can prevent water from building up around your house which can cause water damage to it. A gutter takes the water and channels it to one location where it is sent away from your home. There are gutters with seams and seamless gutters. Many people like the look of the seamless variety, but when aluminum pigmented gutter seal is used on seamless models, they look much the same.

When you have gutters, you may need to keep a few basic aluminium gutter supplies on hand in case your gutters need a little work. This can include gutter seal. When you have aluminum gutters and downspouts, you have durable models that are highly dependable. They also tend to be inexpensive. And, they can be painted to match your home no matter what color it is. When you have gutters, you occasionally need to clean them out because leaves and twigs can build up in them and cause a clog. If you can stand on a ladder, you can do this maintenance yourself.

They are something that you never think about, but heavily rely on. We’re talking about your gutters! Without them, water would pool up on your roof until it destroys the structure of your home, and create a moat around the foundation of your house and slowly corrode it. Within a short period of time, your entire home would be a big pile of rotted out wood. Keeping your gutters happy keeps your entire home happy.

Although it is not something that many homeowners think about often, maintaining the system of exterior drains that keep water from destroying your home is an important part of your regular home upkeep. A few tips for doing that include:

• • Get a good gutter cleaning at the change of the seasons.

    Gutters tend to collect debris over time. Sometimes birds, pests, and rodents make homes in them. Sometimes it can be a hotspot for mold or fungus. If you have trees near your home, they collect leaves as they fall off the trees. Those leaves compost over time, and turn into black gunk that prevent water from draining properly. Sometimes, if gutters are neglected for long enough, they become a metropolitan environment for bugs.

    Getting a good gutter cleaning every season is a good way to prevent your gutters are becoming a home of a creature or a microbe that you don’t want as a houseguest. And more importantly, if your gutters get filled with debris, they get clogged and are unable to properly direct water away from your home.

    If you are a DIYer, you might save yourself some money by doing the cleaning yourself. Otherwise, hiring a gutter cleaning service to take care of it for you is inexpensive and worth every penny as it helps you avoid expensive repairs down the road.

• • Install leaf guards or screens.
    Including screens or guards in your gutter installation is a good way to keep the gunk mentioned above out of the pathway rainwater takes to properly drain away from your home. Many times, this add-on is fairly inexpensive and pays for itself by reduced maintenance requirements.

    Keep in mind that even though having leaf screens sharply reduces your maintenance needs, it does not eliminate the need to clean them altogether. You still need to maintain from time to time. Many experts recommend that instead of cleaning your gutters every quarter, you might only need to do so every one to three years with leaf guards, depending on the quality of your guards and the environment that you live in. It doesn’t hurt to do a quick visual check to make sure there’s no blockage once a year or so, to avoid expense repairs as a result of water damage.

• Make repairs pronto!

  If you have any leaks or breaks in your gutters, they can quickly turn into issues that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars if they lead to water damage in your home. At the change of the season, do a thorough inspection to ensure that no repairs are necessary. Common repairs include:

  • Replacing the spikes that attach the gutter to the fascia board of your home. Many times, these spikes work their way out over time, and can be replaced inexpensively, to properly secure everything together.
  • Reapplying the caulking around your gutter seams. As the caulking that keeps your drain system water-proof gets old and dried-out from the sun, it tends to crack and results in leaks in the seams. A tube of caulking costs less than five dollars and can easily be reapplied yourself. Simply use to a chisel to remove the old caulking and let the area dry thoroughly, and then reapply new silicon to the seam between the gutter and the house.
  • Replacing the rivet on the downspout of your gutters. After years of wear and tear, the rivets that connect the downspout together and to the house will become loose. If left unchecked, this can lead to greater damage. You can install new rivets with an inexpensive rivet gun found at your local hardware store. In most cases, both the rivets and the gun cost less than $20.

Do you have any other important gutter maintenance tips that we didn’t include? Please share them in the comment section below!