Cleaning Your Gutters for Spring Home Maintenance
The arrival of warmer spring weather gives many folks a welcome opportunity to complete important outdoor maintenance tasks. One messy project deserves to rank high on your seasonal “to-do” list: cleaning your gutters. Taking some time to perform this job after the disappearance of snow and ice from the yard offers some surprising benefits.
Metal rooftop gutters positioned along the eaves catch melting snow and ice. These open pipes direct this runoff into downspouts that channel the flow into desired locations away from the residence. Unfortunately, during a typical winter, gutters become clogged with windblown debris that lands on the roof: dust, leaves, twigs, and other materials sometimes wind up in the gutter system. Consider four reasons why many home improvement experts rank springtime gutter cleaning so highly:
1. Avoid Inconvenience And Discomfort
From a purely practical matter, clogged gutters and downspouts create inconvenience. No one enjoys stepping from the residence onto an adjoining patio or deck and finding themselves doused with cold, dirty water. Yet if you sustain heavy winter snows or still have leaves and twigs in your gutters from fall and winter, a badly clogged gutter system sometimes produces this unwelcome experience!
Debris filling the gutter prevent runoff from leaving the roof through the downspouts. Instead, during heavy melts, water cascades over the rims of the gutters and splashes onto unsuspecting people below. Cleaning your gutters prevents this inconvenience.
2. Keep Residential Exteriors Appealing
By ensuring you clean your home’s gutters during the spring, you’ll also discover you reduce some other maintenance burdens. For instance, today homeowners often obtain periodic exterior power washing services. This process cleans away the splatter and grime which sometimes obscures beautiful siding.
Badly clogged gutters allow dirty water to pour onto the ground and increase the likelihood of windblown droplets landing on adjoining sections of the residence. You’ll discover you need to obtain power washing assistance less often if you clean out your home’s gutters every spring. This simple task also makes it much easier to maintain windows in a sparkling clean condition.
3. Promote Water Runoff
Of course, cleaning the gutters in the spring also ensures these water runoff channels continue to operate correctly. By removing any accumulated mud, leaves, and windblown detritus, you’ll allow rainwater to flow into designated locations. Water will reach the downspouts faster and cause less damage during transit.
Clogged gutters may eventually begin rusting. Water trapped in the gutter sometimes contributes to the expansion of pinhole leaks caused by branches or hail. Gutter cleaning every spring reduces this problem.
4. Protect Basement Waterproofing
Since a gutter and downspout system collects water from the entire roof, it must often control copious amounts of runoff. The downspouts direct this rainwater and melting snow and ice away from the home. By maintaining your residential gutters in good condition, you’ll benefit another part of your residence: the basement.
Poorly maintained gutters let runoff pour directly around the outside of the home. When large volumes of water soak into the ground around a man-made structure, the soil may become water-logged. In some situations, this process contributes to wet basements. One very important reason to consider cleaning out residential gutters during the spring involves minimizing the chance of runoff seeping from the water-saturated ground outside the home into the basement.
Maintaining a Beautiful Home
Springtime gutter maintenance offers important benefits. While sometimes under-rated, this project matters. Buyer’s Edge, LLC is Western North Carolina and Upstate South Carolina’s premier choice for inspection services. Whether you are buying a home, selling a home, or having a new home built, contact us to book an appointment.