The Unpleasant Truth About Gutter Covers

This is not about any particular brand of gutter guard. This is about the concept of the gutter guard--which is a screen placed under your last bit of roofing tile and over your outer gutter edge so leaves and other debris can't fall in, get stuck, and cause nasty floods and backups.

I've had the nasty floods and backups in my gutters. I live surrounded by hundreds of tall trees. Vast numbers of leaves get stuck in my gutters. I usually have to pay someone to come clear out the gutters twice a year. It's a two-story house and I am not young, so DIY is not an option. In good economic times, it's hard to find anyone willing to clean out gutters, even though it's a simple enough job. In bad weather, even if I find someone to clean out the gutters, the leaves may be frozen into place and impossible to remove. So I have to make an appointment far in advance with the one person I have found who will clean out gutters, and then I have to hope that the weather will be decent on that particular day.

My luck was bad one year. The leaves were still jamming up the gutters when we had a torrential downpour. Because the gutters were jammed, water leaked through my skylights. This was not a fun experience. So I paid to have gutter guards installed. The cost was approximately what it costs to have the gutters cleaned four times, which means that I'll even on the cost in two years.

Meanwhile, there's something else to consider. The gutter guards do a fine job keeping leaves out of the gutters. But the guards themselves are screens that are basically suspended in air. Bridges are suspended in air and they freeze before roads do--we've all seen those signs. When snow or freezing rain falls, these gutter covers become jammed with ice. Snow melts off the warm roof and freezes when it hits the guards. Or freezing rain stays frozen on the guards even though it melts on the roof. Houses leak a lot of heat, but they don't leak much into the gutters, so the screens stay full of ice even as the snow melts off the roof.

Water then drips vigorously along the house line, all around the house. Why have gutters at all if they're going to become inoperable? Gutter guards of any ilk that create icy conditions such as I've described lead to flooded basements. The water that should be caught in the gutters and safely transported far from the foundation by downspouts and their extenders instead rolls across the iced-up gutter covers and drips down directly next to the edge of the house.

Brilliant, huh? These covers are absolutely useless in snow and ice. They actively create a hazard by creating icy buildup right outside your doors, too. And guess what? They also do not eliminate the possibility of the dreaded ice dams usually caused by jammed, flooded, iced-up gutters. These frozen gutter covers can dam up, too, and block water that should descend into the gutters or at the very least across the covers.

I honestly do not know which is worse: skylight leaks because the gutters are jammed with leaves or basement leaks because the gutter covers render the gutters useless. I remember living in a house with no gutters. I didn't have either problem because the house was built on a concrete slab and had no basement. (It also had slab heat that took 24 hours to warm the house, but that's another rant.)

Beware any sort of gutter covering that can fill with water and freeze up and block water from entering your gutters. That would be pretty much any gutter covering, I think. I need to put the guy who cleans out gutters on retainer.