While gutters are typically an after-thought when it comes to your home maintenance, they are actually quite important. If you don’t have gutters, you could be looking at insurmountable problems which can be costly and serious over time. If you have not been actively maintaining your gutters such as cleaning them out regularly or repairing missing/damaged pieces, you could be in the same position.
Unfortunately, gutters are usually overlooked by many homeowners, but they most certainly shouldn’t be. Let’s discuss why gutters are so important to your home as whole and why maintaining them is so essential.
What Do Gutters Do?
This may seem like a common sense answer, but gutters are responsible for carrying water away from your home. Heavy rainfall can wreak havoc on your home, especially to your siding, windows, doors, and foundation. Without proper working gutters you could wind up with a long list of serious and costly damages after the rain ends. Water can begin to pool around the foundation of your home, seeping into areas it shouldn’t, eventually causing extensive water damage issues that can’t be fixed overnight.
In short, your home’s gutters protect your foundation, help prevent erosion, protect your flowerbeds and landscaping, and prevent basement and crawl space flooding when working properly. They can even help prevent paint/stain damage to your siding, mold growth, and even mildew as the excess moisture is diverted away from your home.
How Do Gutters Protect Your Home?
It’s not enough to simply just have gutters installed on your home and forget about them. Gutters need to be cleaned regularly in order to ensure they are working properly.
A proper gutter system should be free of holes and gaps and should be pitched properly towards your downspouts. It’s also a great idea to make sure that the gutters are clearly secured to your home and not pulling away or bowing from your roofline. If you do notice your gutters sagging or pulling away from your home, this could either be due to clogged gutters or faulty internal hangers. This is very common in older homes. Finally, a fully functioning gutter system will include downspouts that are free of debris, sitting 4-6 feet away from the base of your home.
The most common reason that gutters end up “failing” at diverting water away from your home is because of clogging. Those clogs are caused by leaves, shingle debris, pine needles, nests, and other debris that enter your gutters preventing any water from being diverted away from your home as it should. Eventually, water will overflow on to your soffit and fascia, back up onto your roof, and pool around the base of your home as we have already discussed.
How Gutter Guards Can Help
Hiring an annual gutter cleaner can get expensive, and cleaning gutters on your own can be time consuming and dangerous. However, gutter guards are a great option for any homeowner who wants to make the most of their time while ensuring that their gutters are working properly. Gutter guards do just what you think they might based on their name – guard your gutters from debris. So, instead of wasting time this season on cleaning out your gutters, ask about how gutter guards can make your life easier. Just like anything else in life, the better you take care of something, the longer it’ll last. And that is very true for gutters as well.
If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to ask. We are here to help! If you’re interested in learning more about the gutter guards we offer, we would be happy to discuss that with you. If you have damaged or missing gutters, we can help with that as well! Just give us a call, shoot us a message, or visit our website to request a free inspection and quote today!