There are many quick and easy tasks that you can do to keep your home looking good and maintain it’s value. But often it is easy to ignore or neglect these tasks since they seem trivial and of negligible value. And one of these seemingly unimportant jobs is maintaining the rain gutters on your home.
Installing rain gutters on your house and keeping them clean and in good shape has a number of advantages. It seems obvious that your house is outside in the weather. While that is true, rain gutters and eave troughs really can protect your home. They do this by keeping the majority of the rain off your exterior siding or masonry and by routing the rainwater out and away from your foundation.
Rain running off a roof without gutters onto concrete driveways and walks can pit out and gouge a channel in a matter of just a few years. And if you don’t have rain gutters the large amount of water coming off your roof and falling right next to the foundation of your house will cause settling of the ground near the foundation. This will cause the thousands of gallons of water that fall on your roof each year along with the water around your house to seep down next to your basement walls.
If you live in a climate where it freezes in the winter, this is an especially troublesome problem since the expanding and contracting of this supersaturated frozen ground is one of the main causes of foundation cracks and basement wall problems.
If you don’t have rain gutters on your home, it is easy to install them. The vinyl rain gutters available today at local home improvement stores are fairly quick and easy to put up. You can find gutter contractors do your rain gutter installation and some of these offer seamless rain gutters which is a nice feature. But if you want to do it yourself this is a project well within the reach of anyone with a little DIY skill and can be done over a weekend. If your installation project generates a lot of trash or if you do a general clean up of your property at the same time, check out our information about roll off containers and roll off dumpsters to use to get rid of the debris.
Then it is simply a matter of maintaining the gutters by cleaning them twice a year, spring and fall, and you’ll add years to the life of your home. When you clean the gutters, remove all the debris you find inside. Check the openings where the downspout connects to make sure that it isn’t plugged and that the water can run freely.
Repair any broken or loose gutters and make sure that you have the proper slope for drainage. A drop of approximately one inch per each 20 feet of run works well. Fix any leaks or holes that you find with gutter sealant. You can get gutter and flashing sealant in tubes that fit your caulking gun. This is a quick and easy way to fix small problems and keep everything in good repair.
If you have a lot of leaves in your yard that create frequent plugging problems for you, it’s possible to keep them out of the gutters by using gutter screen to keep the majority of them out. There are also several new products that use a porous foam filler or brush type material that you place in your eave troughs that fill the space and keep leaves and debris out, but allow the water to run through.
By taking a few hours each year to inspect and clean your rain gutters you’ll take away years of wear from your home’s siding and masonry along with helping to keep your basement dry. It’s a quick and simple do it yourself project with a big payback for the little time it will take you to do it.