The Ultimate Guide to Gutter Maintenance

To get the longest life out of your patio furniture, use oxygen bleach like Stain Solver. Take a look at your cushions for grease and grimy marks caused by summer barbecues and outdoor parties. If you are storing your furniture outside, make sure to properly cover them to avoid damage from potential storms.

With family celebrations and outdoor play, spills are a given for your decks and patios. These spills and messes can leave unwanted stains on your beautiful decks/patios, so we recommend being proactive about the cleaning. Pay close attention to the area around grills and dining tables. Don’t forget to look at areas where guests tend to sit, since this is another place where messes are frequent.

For homes that don’t barbecue year around, turn your grill on high for 15 minutes to burn off any residue that might be caked onto the grill from previous events. Take a look at the drip pans and change them if necessary. It’s important to de-grease the grill top, burners and side tables since the grease will remove easier the sooner it’s done. No one wants to go through the stress of degreasing year old grease from your grill knobs.

• Fertilize: You want to take the early months of the fall as the perfect time to fertilize your garden bed. We recommend reseeding and touching up and bare spots and spreading your fertilizers during the latter half of October. Doing this will give the roots the boost that they need to flourish when spring comes.
• Plant and Prune: Plant your spring bulbs in the earlier part of the fall so roots develop well before the temperature gets colder and the soil cools. Tulips and daffodils are just some of the flowers that should be planted in fall so they are ready to blossom come the springtime. Don’t forget to trim and prune your shrubs or tree to get rid of dead branches. This will better prepare your plants to deal with the colder weather.

Mold and mildew can grow in places where water has not evaporated fast enough. These are issues that become challenging, can affect your health and are expensive to correct. Avoid them by cleaning out your gutters.

Aside from the many things you can prevent, cleaning your gutters also allows you to:

Some homeowners find rodents like mice, squirrels and small raccoons, taking shelter in their gutters. The concave shape and easy access to the ground (through the downspout), make your gutters a great nesting place for little animals. If this is an issue you face, consider getting downspout screens (install them at ground level) with some humane rodent repellent nearby to keep animals from using the downspout as an elevator to the warmth of your attic.

• Mosquitoes and other pests can also become a problem if enough debris builds up to hold enough water. This can become a serious issue and, in a worst case scenario, can make your family and pets vulnerable to illnesses like West Nile or Zika and, at best, annoy your family outdoor gatherings with bug bites.

Long story short, making sure that your gutters are properly maintained is a guaranteed way to help ensure the safety and well-being of both your home and your family.

First things first, if you are going up on a ladder or getting on your roof, make sure you are physically capable of doing such a thing. Always choose the side of caution and, while we’d prefer you end the need to ever go up on a ladder again by installing a gutter guard, hiring a professional is always a better option than risking your safety. People get seriously hurt and can die from ladder falls. While no one thinks they’re at risk, they are, so safety should always be your primary concern.

Here are some tips to properly, safely, and efficiently clean your gutters:

After all the gross stuff is out, make sure to clear out any remaining residue by spraying the hose through the gutters and down the downspouts. Not only will this clean them out but it will help point out leaks, if there are any.

When it comes to maintaining your gutters, the tools that you use can impact your gutter cleaning either positively or negatively (that goes for both you and the gutters). In order to make sure that you are properly maintaining your gutters, it’s important that you use the right tools.

• Plastic Scoop: Use a plastic scoop to remove gunk.
• The Right Hose: When cleaning out your gutters, make sure to use a garden hose with a trigger spray nozzle, this will make it easier to rinse out the gutters and downspouts. Nozzles should also be able to be hung on the ladder so that they’re easy to get to and stay out of your way. Remember, hoses under water pressure are naturally more rigid than the empty hose you pulled out from your garage.
• Wear Gloves: It’s important to protect your hands when cleaning your gutters so be sure to put on gloves. Unprotected gutters get a lot of muck and debris lodged in them. This debris can be ridden with bacteria including droppings from rodents and birds. No one wants to stick their hand in there, so we recommend using sturdy waterproof gardening gloves to avoid potential cuts and protect your hands from the bacteria.
• Wear Goggles: It’s also important to protect your eyes when cleaning gutters. Countless homeowners use water to spray down their gutters and downspouts after pulling out all the big debris. Water can shoot up and get in your eyes. And what did we just say was in that water? It’s not something you want to get on your face, in your nasal cavities, or in your eyes.
• Use Proper Footwear: Use rubber shoes to get the best grip while climbing up and down your ladder. Make sure you can keep them dry as well. This will help you keep your stability and keep you safer.

The cost to have your gutters cleaned can be anywhere between $50 (this tends to be an advertised cost but not what you’ll wind up paying) and $500. This price varies greatly based on the size of your home, the height of your gutters and the amount of work that needs to be done.

We suggest investing in gutter guards which help minimize these costs in the long run and help maintain the health and effectiveness of your gutters. Gutter guards can be attached to your existing gutters and help prevent clogs.

As we mentioned earlier in this ultimate guide to gutter maintenance, different weather and seasons affect our gutters differently. Each season brings with it it’s own unique problems. We’ve broken down some of the most common gutter problems by season below.

In the summer, your gutters can quickly fill with the leaves or needles from stressed trees, which can lead to problems. If you should get a quick thunder burst of rain, your gutters may have enough organic material built up in them that the debris will collect over the downspouts, which can cause the gutter to fill with water and overflow. Since the ground near your home is parched and baked dry, it’s not going to absorb the rain the way it normally would. Your landscaping may be impacted; some may easily get washed away.

In areas of the country that are prone to wildfires, debris-filled gutters can be all the tinder an ember in the wind needs to carry the fire onto a home. In many places where wildfires are common, homeowners that don’t keep their gutters clear often get notices posted on their doors from their local fire department. Clean your gutters within 30 days, it will say, or risk getting fined by us.

While in some instances, this might seem intrusive and annoying, firefighters only have your best interest at heart. They wouldn’t be driving through your neighborhood looking for these conditions if they did not.

Gutter problems like this are easily rectified with a quick gutter cleaning or by installing a gutter guard like MasterShield that won’t let any debris into the gutter since it filters out anything bigger than half the width of a human hair. Through our patented technology, water reacts as if nothing covered the gutter, quickly dropping into the gutter trough to be carried to where it can do no harm.

It’s best to presume that free-flowing gutters aren’t something you just have to think about once in the spring or once again in the fall or even only when it rains. Given the damage water can quickly do (like flooding your basement), gutters remain a main outdoor feature of your home that you need to be constantly aware of, depending on the weather of the season.

Clear, clean gutters help assure that your home is safe from whatever Mother Nature chooses to send your way.

Gutters that pull from your home have often been up for years and were originally hung with spikes and ferrules. Spikes are nailed into your fascia and the constant freeze thaw cycle or weight from being filled with debris causes them to pull away and fail. Time to get new gutters! Make sure they’re hung with hidden hangers. And don’t skimp on hangers as they too can be the cause of a collapsed gutter. In colder climates, you’ll want hangers installed closer together. Ask the installer to get as many as he can into the joists behind the fascia for extra support.

You can be a saint about cleaning your gutters, but it doesn’t take much for debris to knit together over a downspout allowing them to fill up with water. Depending on how your gutters are hung, water can get behind them, into your soffit and follow the path of least resistance. We’ve seen situations where it runs behind a home’s siding. If a gutter is hung too high and your shingles drape into the gutter, they will act like straws and pull water up and onto a roof. Dry rot is common in California because of this very situation. Dry rot can lead to removing sections of roof shingles and the wood underlayment, sometimes resulting in rafter rot. Shingles should never extend into a gutter.

If clogged gutters were not your issue, the past winter could have left its toll and led to its own spring gutter problems. Gutters filled with ice will often lead to the same problems as a spring gutter clog with water melting the solid block of ice that has formed in your gutters.

Pollen on your gutter guard can be part of common spring gutter problems if your home already has gutter covers. Pollen can build up if it doesn’t rain while trees drop all their buds. Sap can accompany pollen as well. If it doesn’t rain, pollen and sap dry on the covers. If you go for a period of time without a lot of rain, spray your hose onto your roof to wash this away. Think of how much windshield washer fluid it takes just to clean this gunk off your car’s windshield from the time you park it in the evening until you get back in it in the morning as a guide and get your roof wet!

All in all, spring gutter problems should be addressed before summer thunderstorms hit. A flash summer storm can cause gutters to overflow in a matter of moments, so address these problems early.

If your gutters are clog free but you’re still experiencing drippage and improper water flow, you have leaky gutters. Many times, this problem is caused by erosion or a crack in your gutters. In order to fix this, you can patch the leak with a non-silicone caulking and reseal the whole seam. Silicone breaks down in sunlight, so look at the label of your caulk to be sure it’s not affected by UV light. Be aware that this could become a recurring issue in the future and further repair may be necessary. Caulking over existing caulk doesn’t normally solve the problem. The best solution is scraping out all of the old caulk and working from a clean surface.

Gutter guards are designed to keep debris out of a gutter. Do gutter guards work? They work best when exposed to rain and when overall temperatures don’t regularly drop below freezing with the exception of the winter months.

Because gutter guards are on the exterior parts of your house, you will face the same problem that the rest of your roof must deal with, leaves and other tree debris.

Gutter guards stop debris from getting into your gutters but you will have to give them some kind of maintenance every once in a while. This includes going up on a ladder, occasionally, and brushing off any leaves or debris covering the gutter guard.

Although gutter guards seem like they would be expensive, the following information will show you that installing guards can actually save you money in the long run. Gutter guards offer peace of mind and prevent costly home repairs costs by malfunctioning gutters.

A gutter guard installation is one of the cheapest home improvement projects in the industry. Installing gutter guards costs less than your average paint jobs, roofing projects, landscaping or other projects. We recommend the micro-mesh gutter guard technology by Alex Higginbotham which will give you the biggest bang for your buck. The MasterShield Gutter Guard won’t clog, has a lifetime warranty, and will keep your gutters functioning correctly with minimal maintenance.

It’s not practical to compare the cost of gutter guards to the cost of gutter cleaning. Gutter guards are an investment which require several years to pay for, while cleanings are recurring costs. Gutter guards become part of your house and work with your roof. With standard gutter cleanings, you are likely to begin collecting debris virtually immediately after you have your gutters cleaned. You might find yourself dealing with a clogged gutter merely two weeks after getting it cleaned, making you question whether a gutter cleaning was even effective. With a gutter guard, you know that your gutters will remain working normally with little upkeep.

It’s important to know that gutters with gutter guards still need to be cleaned, but this is less frequent then unprotected gutters. Gutter guard protected gutters should be cleaned at least once every two years, and more frequently if there is heavy tree coverage near your home.

Gutter guards are an investment which greatly decrease the frequency of gutter cleaning while preserving and enhancing the performance of your gutter system. However, there is no gutter guard on the planet that is completely maintenance free. Like any other external part of your home, some minor cleaning or upkeep is necessary to keep the product performing as it should.

Every home is different. Some homeowners might only need gutter guard maintenance once every 10 years while other homeowners might need to do maintenance once every 2 years. All this is based on the environment where you reside. Do you have a lot of trees in your areas? Do you get a lot of wind on all parts of your home? No matter the frequency or environment surrounding your home, we have the tips you need to keep your gutter guards working like new, this fall.

The honest answer to “how often will I need to clean?” depends on what is over your roof. MasterShield’s SelfClean Mesh™ uses roofline pitch and moving water to keep debris from settling on the guard, so for most homes maintenance becomes an occasional check, not a chore. Here’s what to expect by yard type:

• Open lot or few trees: scheduled cleaning typically ends. A quick visual check two or three times a year confirms everything is in place.
• Moderate mixed trees: in most seasons an inspection is enough. After an unusually heavy maple seed year, a light brushing may be worth doing.
• Heavy pine or the Pacific Northwest: lots of needles plus constant wet weather is a tough test for any guard. CopperCare™ holds up better than standard mesh, but plan on a quick look once a year.
• Trees directly over the roof: debris falls straight onto the guard, so an annual inspection is a must. Expect much less work, not zero.

That’s the honest promise: not zero maintenance, but a lot less of it.

Before winter, take a few minutes to check:

• Guard surface: make sure no debris mat built up over the summer, especially in sheltered corners and roof valleys.
• Downspouts: run a hose into the gutter and confirm each downspout drains freely.
• Hardware: look for loose spikes or hangers. Freeze-thaw cycles make loose hardware worse.
• Pitch: water should drain toward the downspout, not pool in the middle of a run.
• Fascia: soft wood behind the gutter is an early sign of rot, and it’s cheaper to fix now than in spring.

You may be dealing with shingle grit on your gutter guard. Good news: they aren’t getting into your gutter. However, those small particles can collect on top of your gutter guards. Dealing with shingle grit is very simple, simply brush off the grit from your gutter guard and it will be functioning like new.

Let’s face it, if moss can grow on rocks, they can grow on your gutter guards. Not to worry, simply stop at your local hardware store and buy products like Wet & Forget or other moss killers and once again your gutter guard will resume its job of protecting your gutters. Additionally, copper is proven to break down organisms like moss, algae and lichen. Install our copper interlaced MasterShield Gutter Guard to reduce the incidence of moss.

And there you have it, everything you need to know about gutter maintenance. Gutter guards make your life much simpler and lessen the hassle of maintenance. But like other home exterior products, they too need a little TLC once in a while.

Homeowners are regularly enticed to opt for gutter cleaning instead of investing in gutter guards. Although gutter cleanings seem cheaper, they actually end up costing significantly more in the long run. This is because gutter cleaning prices vary tremendously. That flat rate fee ends up increasing significantly when the salesperson sees the height of your gutters, size of your house, and level of debris accumulated. And you don’t only pay this price once; you pay this a couple times a year to maintain the integrity of your gutters. This cost quickly adds up, but this can be avoided by investing in gutter guards which end up paying for itself in no time.

Here are some important questions to ask yourself about your gutter cleaners.

• How well are they cleaning your gutters?
• Will they clean up everything that lands on the ground?
• Are they just blowing off debris from your roof or are they sticking their hand and taking out all the muck in your gutters.
• Do they use a hose to wash your gutters clean?
• Did they clean out the downspouts? Often times, gutter cleaners forget to wash out the debris from the downspouts and have to be called back to fix a mistake they left.
• Will They Rope You Into a Contract? Many homes need about 2-3 gutter cleanings a year, more if the home has heavy tree coverage, so a contract isn’t necessarily a bad option. However, a gutter guard will avoid these contracts, since you have them installed once. Gutter guards require minimal maintenance while preserving the integrity of your gutters.

All in all, gutter maintenance is absolutely attainable – especially if you choose to use Mastershield Gutter Guards. Using gutter guards will allow you to clean your gutters less frequently and save on all kinds of gutter costs. We hope this guide has been helpful for you and your gutter cleaning needs. Remember, the best way to prevent any gutter issues is to make sure that you are cleaning them frequently enough. Another way to help prevent gutter issues is by installing gutter guards.