The downspout is the section of gutter that travels down the side of the house and where the water exits the gutter system. Typically, the downspout turns at ground level to lead the water away from your foundation. But that small redirection might not be enough because there is no way to guarantee the water will not run back towards the house. A small downward incline next to your house could spell disaster. One way to guarantee that the water will not make it back to your home’s foundation is to bury the downspouts. If you bury the downspouts and direct the water far enough away from the house then there will be no risk to your stability and foundation.

Soaker Hose Irrigation

Burying downspouts has another advantage in that you can use that water for various purposes. For example, you could direct the water to an outdoor vegetable garden and use it for irrigation. You can attach your downspout to a soaker hose that will also be buried. Then your vegetables or flowers will be watered at root level, which will help them thrive.

Another reason you might want to bury your downspout is so that you can direct the water to a storm drain more effectively. If the water is left to saturate your lawn and find its own way to the storm drain, then you could have a soggy yard if you get a lot of rain in your area.

Now that you know why you should bury your downspouts, you should know how to do it. The first step is to dig a trench where the downspout will go. The trench needs to start next to the house and end eight feet away. Next to the house, the trench should be about eighteen inches deep and at the end, it should be about thirty inches deep. Te downward slope will keep the water from running back towards your home. The entire tranche should be about fifteen inches wide.

Line the trench with a piece of tarp that is two feet side and folded in half and one foot longer than the length of the trench. The extra foot should be at the end close to the house. Cover the tarp with gravel. Place the piece of draining gutter pipe in the trench so that the holes are facing down. Cover the drain piece with approximately three inches of gravel and then fill in with dirt. The dirt should be about three to four inches higher than the surrounding ground level. Walk on the soil to pack it down and let it settle for seven to ten days. Later you can fill in where you think you need more dirt.

The first thing you might consider doing to rinsing the gutters off with a garden hose. You probably dripped and made a little bit of a mess when you were scooping so you should use the hose to wash the inside and outside of the gutter system as well as the siding. Once you have washed away any loose drips or pieces, you need to inspect your gutter to see if any scrubbing in necessary.

A gutter brush is a round brush similar to ones you might have used in high school chemistry to wash out test tubes, except bigger. The round brush will scrub the bottom and both sides of the gutter at the same time. When mold or mildew builds up it can be hard to get off without a little elbow grease. If you can still not remove the stains then you might consider some kind of heavy duty household cleaner. But be careful to test the cleaner on a small area of the gutter first to make sure that it does not discolor or damage your gutters. Once the inside of the gutter system is clean, you will rinse with the hose again.

Your next step is to turn to the outside of your gutters. Many people are so concerned with getting out the clogs that they overlook the fact that the outside of the gutters is dirty and stained as well. You can clean the outside of the gutters with a sponge or cloth. If something more intense is needed then a scrub brush can be used as well. Remember to follow the same rules about cleaning solutions and pay even closer attention because everybody can see the outside of your gutters. You will be amazed at how much better your home looks from the curb with clean gutters.

First, you can make a pretty serviceable tool from an empty milk or juice container. You can reference my previous post for information on how to do this. You can also use any kind of powder scoop. You just want to make sure that the scoop has the right width. Gutter scoops are made in sizes that correspond to common gutter sizes so that the scoop is exactly the right size to fit into the gutter and scoop out all of the debris without having to do multiple passes. If you substitute other kinds of scoop then you will have to measure your gutters and the scoop to make sure it will fit and that you can collect a majority of the debris with one scooping action in each section.

Garden trowels are another alternative. The only problem with this kind of tool is that they usually do not have high sides like a gutter scoop and most of the things you dislodge with your scooping action will fall off the trowel before you can get it to the trash bag or collecting container you are using. This will slow you down considerably because you will have to pick up the same material over and over again. Secondly, you run the risk of dropping things off the trowel after you have left the gutter and dripping wet leaves and dirt down the side of you house.

If none of the tools you find in your home or shed seem to be quite right, then you can always use your hands. If you decide to clean out your gutters by hand then there are a few safety considerations. You do not want to touch the gutter debris with your bare hands so you must wear gloves. Any nitrile or latex glove will do. You just want to make sure that you will not come in direct contact with the possible bacteria or mold that might be growing in your gutters. Make sure the gloves extend past your wrist and when you put them on, try to pull them over your long sleeved shirt so that no skin is exposed.

First, rotting leaves and other tree debris can be breeding grounds for bacteria of several different varieties as well as mold. Touching possible mold contamination with your bare hands is not a good idea because a majority of the population suffers from some kind of mold allergy. The effects can range from a slight irritation of the throat to death. Even if you wear gloves you risk inadvertent exposure. By distancing yourself form the debris with a long handled gutter scoop, you minimize your chances of mold exposure.

Second, gutter cleaning can be a little bit messy. When you pick up piles of wet debris with your hands, material seeps out between your fingers and from others areas of your fist. As you move that hand from the gutter to the garbage bag you brought up the ladder, you could be dripping dirty water and debris onto your siding. A scoop with high sides will make sure that material does not fall out in the short amount of time it takes to go from the gutter to the trash bag.

Finally, using a gutter tool like the scoop will make the gutter cleaning go much faster. A piece of equipment can pick up significantly more material with every scoop than your hands can. In addition, the long handle allows you to clean a larger section of gutter system before having to climb down and move the ladder. That step is clearly the most time consuming. All in all gutter scoops are a good way to protect yourself, the cleanliness of your siding, and the amount of time you need to spend cleaning your gutters.

If you want to make your own gutter scoop then you probably have or will have all the things you need in your house right now. The first thing you will need is an empty plastic bottle such as a milk jug. You will also need a pair of scissors and a pen. If you wait a few days an empty container is bound to show up and I think that pretty much everyone has a pen and a pair of scissors in their home.

It is important to remember to keep the lid of the container. If you throw away the lid then there will be a hole at the end of the scoop where you intend the debris to settle. That would make the tool unusable. Your next step is to orient the bottle so that you can hold it by the handle and it is on its side. You want to handle on the upper most side. This means that the bottle will be oriented so that the bottom of the bottle is facing you in a diamond shape. Once you have the right orientation you need to start making your cut lines.

Start at the bottom corner and draw a V up to the two middle corners. You will now have a V on the former bottom of the milk jug. Remember that the top corner is the same side of the container as the handle. Next, put a dot somewhere between the bottom of the handle and that last unmarked corner. Finally connect the dot to the two middle corners. The lines will go down the former sides of the milk jug. If you cut along these lines, you will get a perfectly serviceable gutter scoop. So you can make a gutter scoop for at virtually no cost to you.

Gutter scoops are just as they sound. They are tools for scooping out the debris. They usually have high sides so that their capacity is as great as possible. The more debris you get with every scooping action, the faster the chore will go. For the same reason they are usually quite long. The picture to the right shows a good example of a gutter scoop.

Another attribute is that they often have long handles. The reason for the long handle is that cleaning your gutter takes place on a ladder. Therefore, you can only reach so far before you have to climb down and move the ladder. The longer the handle, the larger the section of gutter you can clean before getting down. This will also help shorten the time you will spend on this necessary household task. Moving the ladder is often the most time consuming step.

These tools can be purchased at a large home improvement warehouse like Home Depot or Lowes, or maybe even your local hardware store. However, you do not have to buy something called a gutter scoop specifically. Any large scoop will do. A garden trowel, a large spoon, or even an empty milk jug with one side cut out can serve as serviceable gutter scoops. The only rules are that the tool be able to scoop out debris and be easy to handle.

What happens with the rain water running off your roof and over the gutter guards is that when the water reaches the edge of the gutter guard system, and starts to fall over the side, the water adheres to the gutter system a fraction longer than anything else, allowing for the water to fall into the small slits on the side of the gutter guard. The picture below demonstrates nicely.

If it were not for the adhesive properties of water, this type of gutter protection would not work. Therefore you would have to use screen or mesh gutter guards instead.

You can make your gutter guards entirely from scratch by buying some chicken wire or vinyl mesh on a roll and a few gutter clips. The first step is to measure you gutter system carefully. You want to know how wide they are so that you can cut the mesh just a little bit larger. You also need to get accurate measurements of the length of each section. However, you do not want to make one long piece of gutter guard to fasten on and cover the entire length of the house. Instead, you want to cut as many three to four feet sections as you will need so that you can overlap the pieces a little still cover the entire length.

Cutting the pieces can be accomplished with a pair of wire cutters or snips. When you come to the corners you will have to do a little more cutting. For outside gutter corners you can cut the screens on an angle so that they come together nicely at the corner. There is no need for overlap here. However, if you come to an inside corner you should allow the straight pieces from the long sections come all the way to the end and overlap each other. The reason you want extra protection here is that an inside gutter corner is usually at a spot where the eaves of your roof come to a valley. Debris collects here and is funneled toward your gutter system. Extra gutter guards are always welcome in these situations.

The gutter clips are fasteners that hook into a loop or hole in the mesh or wire screen and then slip on to the front of the gutter system. Once the gutter clips are in place, you can lay the mesh over the bottom of the shingles on your roof. You can make sure the vinyl mesh or chicken wire stays in place by using small thumb tacks in you shingles. This overlapping of the shingles and gutter screen will make sure there is no way for debris to fall into your gutters.

An alternative to cutting your own sections of gutter guard out of chicken wire or vinyl mesh rolls is to buy premade gutter screen pieces at your local hardware. These pieces are usually made of aluminum which will not rust and are already in three or four foot sections.

The first type is gutter screens. The gutter screens can be broken down further into two sub categories. Some screens lay flat across the top of your gutters and some have a curved shape to them so that they are convex over the top of the gutters. There are advantages to both types. The flat gutter screens are harder to see from ground level. If they are installed correctly you will not even be able to tell they are there. However, the flat surface is the perfect place for leaves and debris to settle. If the holes get covered up by leaves, then the water will have nowhere to go and will run off the side of the house rather than into the gutter system. The curved gutter mesh screens work better in this respect. The curved edges encourage debris to fall off and do not get clogged up as easily. However, you can see these screens from the ground and might be bad for your curb appeal.

The second type of gutter guard system available from Amerimax are what they call shingle gutter covers. These gutter covers are a combination of a solid cover and a screen. There are layers that are mesh and layers that are solid. The screen locks into the far side of the gutters and lays over the roof so that it blends in with your shingles. The sloped bend allows debris to slide off but the water to fall into the gutter.

The third type of gutter guard is a solid cover that works on the principle of water adhesion. These solid covers have a nice look to them and cannot get clogged with leaves or debris because the opening for the water is actually over the edge. The leaves have already fallen off the house by the time the water turns the corner and is falling into the gutter system.

Most of the gutter guard systems from Amerimax snap into place in between the edges of the gutter opening. This makes it easy to remove the guards if you ever need access to the gutters for cleaning or on the off chance that something gets through the guard. However, there are some that attach using clips. These meal clips grab the edge of the gutter system and hold the gutter guard into place. You generally only install these on one side leaving the other side free to bend up if you need access to the gutters.

As your gutters fill up with these other things, they get wet as rain water runs through the gutters. Leaving damp organic material sitting in the warm sun is the perfect environment for mold and mildew to form. You not only have to clear your gutters of the debris, but you need to scrub them because of the mold and mildew that forms in between cleanings.

Gutter guard systems can help you avoid all that. If leaves and debris never pile up then there is less of a chance that mold and mildew will form. Gutter guards will save you time and energy in terms of how often you need to clean your gutters. In addition, they offer you a way to avoid the dangers of working on a ladder and coming into contact with possibly dangerous mold spores.

And believe it or not, over the lifetime of your gutters, gutter guards will save you money. You might pay a gutter cleaning service $200 to clean your gutters twice a year. Even the most expensive gutter protection systems cost only $3,000. That means you will have paid for the gutter protection in less than ten years. In addition, gutter guards add curb appeal to your home so they will help with resale value. That can be invaluable in hard economic times.