Gutter Guard Pitch Impacts How Much Debris Sits on the System
Gutter guard pitch? Is it baseball season? Well, almost, but we’re not talking that kind of pitch. We’re talking roof pitch and that, in layman’s terms, is how steep your roof is. In the industry, you’ll hear roof pitch discussed in numerical terms, such as “four-twelve”, “six-twelve” or “ten-twelve”, which is the relationship of how many inches up a roof goes over a twelve inch distance. This creates the angle and the pitch of your roof.
Back to why it’s important to mirror or match this pitch when your considering protecting your gutters. When a gutter guard pitch is at the same angle as the roof, the debris you’re trying to keep out of your gutter reacts the same as it does as it rolls down your roof. Wind tends to blow things down and off your roof quite efficiently– so long as you don’t change the angle of the gutter guard. When you change this angle, you’re more likely to create a shelf that can hold and trap debris. This typically has more of an impact in the Spring, when debris tends to be smaller and tends to gather in clumps, a result of trees budding. Fall leaves tend to be lighter and easier to blow away. If you’re dealing with pine and fir needles, they tend to be heavier and are more likely to build up like Spring debris.
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Gutter Guard Pitch is Good, Flat is Bad
Your roof will give you a good indication if it and your leaf guard may hold debris. If debris naturally takes a while to shed from your roof, it will tend to take a while to shed off your gutter guard. What can impact debris? Low pitch, how much natural airflow the roof gets, if it has inside roof valleys or if the gutter ends against an exterior wall. On some homes, it can take months for a roof to shed debris, which isn't a problem for gutter guard pitch, so long as it's not creating a shelf. If your roof always looks clean, you'll have no issues with a gutter guard pitched at a matching angle.
We had some fun with our video to teach this point. Fun fact: MasterShield's inventor, Alex Higginbotham, wrote the music and lyrics to the song we used, and it's sung by country music singer, Chip Davis.
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