It's that time of year again!
Let me guess: you climbed the ladder and found exactly what you expected? Your gutters look like the healthy beggining of a small farming project? Is there dirt, leaves, fruit, nuts, what you hope is squirrel droppings and some mysterious looking goo? Well, rest assured that what you’re seeing is normal for gutters in northern California that haven’t been cleaned in a while. Fortunately, you caught it before its turned into a real problem, like roof damage, or flooding gutters that have began to somehow lead water into your home. Before it gets to that point, let get those gutters cleaned.
What exactly do you need to do?
Ultimately, you’re aiming to do three things:
- clear your roof of any leaves or sticks;
- clear the debris out of the gutters; and
- flush the downspouts
If you can do these 3 things, then you’ve restored your gutter drainage system back to good conditioning.
How it's done...
Clearing the roof
This is important for a few reasons. First and foremost, is to prevent the gutters from refilling soon after you clean them. chances are, whatever is in your gutters closely resembles what’s covering your roof. So, if you can clear it, you should. If you don’t, it wont be long before the same tree or wind that helped them get there, will guide them right down into the gutters you’ve cleaned.
The second reason is because the leaves that pile up enough, allow moisture to remain on your roof protected from sun. this eventually turns into moss and small plant roots growing under your roof shingles. That’s definitely bad news.
So, if you can blow everything off with a leaf blower from a ladder or from the roof, that’s ideal. If all you can do is sweep a little from a ladder, that’s better than nothing. The rule of thumb is: do what you safely can do.
Clean the gutters
This is exactly as it sounds. remove all the debris from your gutters. If its a small amount, then you can probably get away with simply blowing them out with minimal mess to clean up afterwards, but if that’s not an option, you will want to go to your local department store like Lowes, Home Depot or Ace Hardware and buy a gutter scooper. they’re usually no more than $5-$10 and make scooping debris out of your gutters easier than the alternatives.
The process is as simple as scoop and dump. scoop up what you can and dump it into a bucket or directly into a trash bag, until you’ve gotten it all.
Flush the spouts
Lastly, and probably most important, is flushing the downspouts. The goal is to make sure water is flowing down the downspouts with no interruptions i.e. making sure the spouts aren’t clogged. The easiest way to do this is to run water from your hose directly down the spouts to see if water flows down or comes back up. If there is a small amount of debris then doing this will be enough to flush it down, but if the gutters are clogged, it wont take long to find that out. The water will begin flooding back towards you to fill the gutter.
To unclog them, there are a few ways depending on how bad the clog is, but ill share the easiest method, if you have a nozzle that allow you to increase the pressure to a stream, you want to shoot the water down the spout in rapid intervals to disturb the debris enough to break it up. this could take several minutes to do, but usually works for minor clogs.
With that final step, you’ll have cleaned your gutters like a pro, and can add Gutter Technician to your resume.
