DO GUTTER GUARDS WORK?

HERE FOR ALL YOUR ROOFING NEEDS!

Wondering whether gutter screens, filters and covers actually work is a common question for anyone who regularly cleans or hires someone to clean their gutters.  The ultimate best answer to this question will depend on the asker’s expectations and perception of what a gutter protection system should accomplish.  To fully answer the question and show the reasons why different expectations might result in different answers, we will first do a quick review of the various types of gutter protection (screens, filters and covers.)

Are you wondering if leaf filters and gutter guards really work?

Below you will learn:

• How gutter cleaning saves you money
• The dangers of dirty gutters
• How to clean your gutters

Do Leaf Filters and Gutter Guards Really Work?

Yes, leaf filters and gutter guards do work! While they have different designs, they are both effective methods of keeping leaves, twigs, debris, and pests out of your gutters and downspouts.  With that being said, due to their different designs, leaf filters and gutter guards have different pros and cons.

What Are Gutter Leaf Guards?

Gutter guards feature unique designs that help prevent small and large debris from entering your gutter system and causing problems.  While they still allow water to filter through, the design prevents leaves, twigs, or other debris from building up in the rain gutter.  The way they work is quite simple: Gutter guards go over the top of your gutters to filter out debris but still allow water to trickle down through the system, to the downspout, and away from your home.  While gutter guards do drastically reduce annual maintenance, they are not foolproof. They require correct installation and routine maintenance to do their job at the utmost efficiency.

What Are The Benefits of Having Gutter Guards?

The benefits of having gutter guards should be clear to most homeowners that deal with leaf-filled gutters every fall.  Let’s face it; gutter cleaning is yet another time-consuming chore on your already lengthy to-do list. It often gets forgotten or set as a low priority.  However, if you don’t have gutter protection and let leaves and debris collect in your gutters for too long, you will end up having costly problems. Many unwanted side effects accompany dirty and clogged gutters – flooding, water damage, sagging gutters, foundation issues, and more.  But with gutter guards, you can prevent clogs in the first place, meaning you can check these potential problems off your worry list.

Less Maintenance

Gutter guards are best for areas where there is thick tree cover.  They are great for homes with flanking trees that drop leaves during seasonally.  If you don’t have nearby trees, they probably aren’t worth the expense.  With that said, gutter guards provide excellent coverage over your gutters, which leads to cleaner gutters for most of the year.  However, when spring and fall roll around, we still recommend cleaning out your gutter system.  But, given that the majority of leaves, sticks, and debris will never get into the gutter thanks to the gutter guards, it is much easier.  Generally, you don’t have to remove the gutter covers to clean the gutters.  However, if you need to remove the covers for a deeper cleaning, it can be a chore and cost you or your gutter cleaning professional more time.

Cost-Effective

Gutter guards can be an outstanding investment, especially on homes requiring professional gutter cleaning multiple times per year. The cost of gutter guards varies widely, primarily based on:

• The size of your home
• Your location
• Brand
• Local labor rates

Avoid Pest Infestations

Clogged gutters packed with leaves, twigs, and other debris make an appealing home for all sorts of pests.  Plus, gutters are located high up and away from the ground, providing a safe nesting area away from predators.  Birds, squirrels, chipmunks, mice, and even snakes hang out in clogged gutters.  Stinging insects, including bees, wasps, and hornets also flock to gutters, as they provide a sheltered spot to craft their nests.  Mosquitoes, ants, and termites also may take up residence in clogged gutters – they like the standing water and food sources that collect in the gutter.  If carpenter ants or termites get into your gutters, they’ll be more likely to access your home through the roof and attic, causing substantial structural damage.  By eliminating clogged gutters, homeowners can decrease the likelihood of pest infestations outside and inside their homes. Gutter guards can help you do exactly that.

What Are The Drawbacks Of Gutter Guards?

As with most things, even the best gutter guards come with some drawbacks. Here are some disadvantages all homeowners should consider.

Maintenance is Still Required

Although gutter guards can be great for mitigating maintenance needs in situations where tree coverage is thick, they do not 100% eliminate maintenance.  Debris that sits on top of the gutter guards will still need cleaning, as leaves can block the crevice and prevent water from flowing into the gutter.  Instead, the water will just roll over the edge next to your home, making the gutter useless.

Seeds, pine needles, and other types of small debris may slip through the gutter guard, causing a blockage.  Even though it usually takes much longer for smaller material to build up, cleaning is still necessary.  Over time, the gutters may begin to accumulate so much debris that the weight causes the gutter to sag or pull away from your home, or it could clog the downspouts.

Most homeowners will save on their gutter maintenance costs with gutter guards.  However, you should recognize that gutter guards won’t make your gutters maintenance-free. Your gutters will still need maintenance and cleaning, just less often.

You Can Damage Them

Gutters protected by gutter guards still need routine care, although not as often as unprotected gutter systems.  Homeowners must be careful when hanging seasonal lights and decorations or doing roof and gutter maintenance, as ladders can dent the gutter guards.  When the gutter guards are damaged or dented, the incurred gaps reduce their effectiveness. Leaves, twigs, seeds, and other debris may be able to enter the gutter system through these gaps, limiting the efficiency of the gutter system.

Waterfall Effect

Certain types of gutter guards can cause a ‘waterfall effect.’ This is essentially where water cascades off the roof during heavy rains and completely misses the gutter systems due to the gutter guard. In this case, the water flows so fast that it dumps over the gutter’s edge instead of falling into the crack. It is similar to filling up a water glass with the sink going full blast– most of the water sprays out instead of filling it.

Many types of gutter guards, such as hooded guards, rely on liquid adhesion principles to direct water into the gutter. During heavy rain showers, the water may flow too quickly down the roof and overcome the adhesion.  On homes that have metal or slate roofs, rainwater travels much faster than on traditional asphalt roof shingles, amplifying this problem.

Pooling and flooding may occur around your home, potentially leading to costly foundation damage. Water tends to follow the path of least resistance and, in some cases, could leak into your basement walls, causing mold and water damage.  It is best to pair gutter guards with splash guards or water diverters in the corners beneath all roofing valleys. The splash guards help prevent water from splashing over the gutter system in the event of heavy rain.

What Are Leaf Filters?

Leaf filters are a different type of gutter cover featuring a unique design.  Instead of the hooded design of gutter guards, leaf filters have a micro mesh screen that filters out debris.  It looks and works like the colander you use to strain pasta after you boil it.  Leaf filters have small holes that filter out the vast majority of debris. The mesh screen is metal, rugged, and high-quality.

What Are The Benefits of Leaf Filters?

Like gutter guards, leaf filters have a unique set of benefits too.  But, since they’re entirely different from the composition of gutter guards, their range of advantages differs slightly.

Easy Installation

Leaf filters do not require a lot of tampering with the existing gutters or roof, allowing for easy installation.  Some other gutter guard types have to attach directly to the roof, which in some cases may void the homeowner’s roof warranty.  On the other hand, leaf filters sit on top of the existing gutters.  Since they don’t require any technical attachments to the roof, homeowners don’t need to worry about damaging the roof of their home. Moreover, the design is not an eyesore and isn’t easily visible from ground level.

Efficiency

Leaf filters are incredibly efficient. Since the mesh screen has tiny holes, they can stop even tiny debris.  However, water is still able to travel through without an issue.  Since they effectively trap the vast majority of particle sizes, homeowners do not need to worry about pest infestations either.  Not only are the gutters less likely to become clogged, but the mesh screen also prevents pests from entering the gutter from above.

Quality Composition

For the most part, leaf filters are high-quality and have a long life. They are typically composed of high-grade stainless steel.  Stainless steel is corrosion-resistant, meaning it’ll last for a long time in all weather conditions.  The leaf filter’s frame is typically PVC, which is temperature resistant and helps with its durability.

What Are the Disadvantages of Gutter Guards

Although leaf filters provide excellent protection to your gutters and are a high-quality option, they do have some disadvantages.  Homeowners should consider each of the pros and cons of leaf filters before deciding which gutter guard is best for their home.

Effectiveness May Be Limited

The small size of the holes in leaf filters is great for sifting out varying sizes of debris, but the tiny fine mesh size is also one of the leaf filter’s downfalls.  Since it filters out so much debris, including leaves, twigs, seeds, gravel, and other small particles, a buildup of dirt and debris can clog the holes.  If homeowners do not clean them regularly, the debris may lead to water pouring over the gutter straight down along the house (it is best to clean them with a brush with stiff bristles).  This can lead to foundation damage, water damage, and a whole handful of headaches.

Water May Miss The Gutters

When substantial buildup occurs on top of the leaf filters, water may flow directly over the top of them, rendering your home’s gutters and leaf filters useless.  If the water rolls over gutters, it may cause considerable damage to the foundation, not to mention the landscaping around your home.  All in all, without proper maintenance, the leaf filter system could potentially render your gutter system temporarily useless.  While you’ll need less frequent maintenance with the leaf filter system, if you skip out on it entirely, you could be sorry.

Tempering Expectations in Light of Real World Factors

To be pleased with the system you choose, you need to understand the difference between clogged gutters and overflowing gutters (clogged is an internal blockage inside the gutter that causes water to dam up and spill over, overflowing refers to water not entering the gutter due to issues with the screen, filter, or cover.)  You additionally need to realize that both your roof and the top of your gutters (which in effect act as an extension of your roof top) still need to be periodically cleaned of debris.  No system in the world can prevent debris from falling out of trees and if for no other reason than your roof’s sake, you need to keep it maintained otherwise moss and other issues will start.

Under-Guttered Houses

Additionally, realize that some houses and roofs were designed with very little thought to the gutters.  If they could find a place to fit gutters on, they were considered adequate.  But in reality, many roofs are under-guttered.  There are locations where too much roof field (the main area of a roof section) drains down into a relatively small amount of gutters.  In heavier rains, even clean, open gutters might overflow in such spots simply from a lack of capacity.  However, if gutter protection is installed on such a home, it may be easy to just assume the protection system is not working.  Plus, certain systems might exacerbate the problem slightly, making them overflow in rains that are heavy, but not torrential.

Trouble Spots

Trouble spots are similar to inadequate gutter in that the end result can be more water than what is fair to expect the gutter to be able to handle.  The most common trouble spots involve areas where upper roofs drop their rainwater onto a lower roof, forcing a small section of gutter to receive excessive water.  Roof valleys are also problematic as they too direct a disproportionate amount of water (that is additionally traveling faster) to a small gutter section.

Environmental Surroundings

Finally, consider the type of debris in your yard (and your neighbor’s too – tree debris can travel much farther than most realize.)   A landscape that exclusively has very large leafed deciduous trees might be able to get a way with a simple screen while ones with smaller debris might be best suited by a micro mesh filter.  Some debris that is easily dealt with by one system might be problematic for another.  Debris that tends to be extra thin, subject to forming a mat (such cottonwood seed clumps) can be more problematic for filters than screens or covers, while pine and fir needles can easily defeat simple screens and reverse curve covers.

Ultimately, if you tend to view gutter protection as a way to help considerably reduce one aspect of home maintenance while not being a perfect, end all solution, then you will likely be pleased with your decision.

Final Thoughts

Always make sure that gutter protection makes a good financial sense and provides adequate peace of mind.  It is wise to compare how often you could pay for your gutters to be cleaned versus the cost of gutter protection.  Certainly there are other reasons to have protection beyond just cost savings, but it makes sense to be familiar with the pay off period.  Additionally, some house locations can benefit from a few less glamorous options, such as larger downspouts or downspout reducers coupled with a knee level downspout clean-out.  While the gutters still will need regular cleaning, some of the frequency is reduced and the most common clog location is brought down to ground level.