"Rain Gutters" isn't a metaphor for a software engineering idea. This post is literally about rain gutters.
In the Seattle area we get a lot of rain. My house has some rain gutters that are more than 20 feet off the ground, and I decided a few years ago that I didn't want to get up on the ladder to clean them out. We don't get a lot of debris in our gutters, but our house is next to a green belt with some tall maples, and so one side of the house gets a lot of big maple leaves in the fall. When I say "big," these leaves can be 10-12" across, and they definitely clog up the gutters.
My first line of attack was to go to Home Depot and Lowes and see what kind of gutter protection systems they had. I picked a flat plastic screen product that had a honeycomb pattern in a stiff plastic layer and then a screen material like a window screen on top of that. I bought about 12' worth of this stuff and installed it in the lowest gutter on my house. That took about 1/2 hour and scaped up most of the knuckles on both hands. I started out wearing gloves, but I couldn't manipulated the screens to get them under the shingles, so eventually I gave up. Plus the shingles were wet, which made it hard to get a grip on them. So it was on to Plan B.
I'd heard ads on the radio for Gutter Helmet, so I thought I'd check them out. We had the Gutter Helmet consultant come out to our house. He measured the gutters and gave us a price quote (and I am not kidding) of $18,000. We talked a lot with him about why it was worth the investment to have worry-free, free-flowing gutters. He pointed out at one point that it would probably cost about $300 to get our gutters cleaned. Let's see-- $18,000 divided by $300 -- I could get my gutters cleaned 60 times, which ought to be good for at least 30 years. He also pointed out that it would probably cost me $3000 to get new gutters installed on my house if my old gutters fell off because of the leaf collections causing them to rot, or some such thing. It was hard for me to see why I should pay $18,000 or even $15,000 to protect something that cost $3000.
After all this discussion, he said if we signed their contract right then and there he could reduce the price to $15,000. I learned a long time ago that I never sign a contract "right then and there," so I told him we'd think about it, but really it was on to Plan C.
When we made the appointment with the Gutter Helmet guy, we hadn't investigated gutter protection systems at all. Considering the price tag, I thought it was time to do some internet research. What I found was an absolutely dizzying array of approaches to protecting gutters. Despite some differences, they seem to break down into several distinct categories of products:
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Screens you put over the gutter, which allows water to pass through the screen but collects leaves and other debris on top of the screen, where you can sweep them off or wait for the wind to blow them off. This is like what I found at Lowes. Some are hinged. Some are snap in. Some are snap on. These seem like they would be effective if they can be installed on your kind of gutter.
Disadvantage: Some debris still gets through, and they still require some cleaning. For my specific problem, the big disadvantage was that they just wouldn't work for my kind of roof and gutter system.
- Foam inserts you put into the gutter, which allows water to pass through the foam but debris stays on top of the foam or blows off.
Disadvantage: Foam breaks down over time, though some foams claim they don't decay as much as others.
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Downspout protectors to keep the downspouts flowing. There are options ranging from inserts that look like big pipe cleaners that you place in the gutter over the downspout, to little wire cages that you insert into the downspout to keep other stuff from going into the downspout.
Disadvantage: Doesn't solve the problem of the gutter getting clogged somewhere other than around the downspout, but these things are super cheap compared to other options, so seems worth trying if you're not worried about other clogs.
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Bigger downspouts and downspout openings, or specially designed downspouts. The idea is that if you have bigger downspouts and downspout openings, they won't get clogged as easily.
Disadvantage: You have to do a lot of work to retrofit the bigger downspouts, and for me personally I already had pretty good size downspouts.
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Rigid caps you put on the gutter that minimize the size of the opening that goes into the gutter itself. Some of these have a curved edge supposedly lets the water cling to the edge, and leaves and other debris will fly off instead of following the water around the curve. Others just have a narrow opening that's too small for larger debris (e.g., leaves) to pass through (Gutter Helmet and Gutter Topper fall into this category). Others have holes about 1 cm square that let the water pass through.
Disadvantage: Very expensive (e.g., Gutter Helmet), usually need to be professionally installed, may require repositioning the gutter (as it would have on my house), can change the appearance of the roof line of the house, and many consumers have reported that these still clog.
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Rain diffusers -- replaces the gutter with something that causes the rain to break into a fine spray and projects it away from your house instead of streaming off your roof.
Disadvantage: This approach seemed interesting but impractical in my area (Seattle) where I don't just want the rain moved away from my house and broadcast into a 4' stripe around my house; I need to have it collected and carried away completely.
I ended up looking at dozens of products, all of which claim to have superior performance and several patents each, and many of which criticize all the other products in convincing ways. The net effect of all this was that I was convinced that none of the products would actually work.
Finally I stumbled across Gutter Love It (www.gutterloveit.com), and their approach struck me as just obviously better. It's like in software design when you've been considering numerous mediocre design solutions and carefully studying strengths and weaknesses and deciding which lesser evil you want to go with. And then finally somebody says, "What if we just do this?" And you slap your forehead and realize that it should have been obvious the whole time, except that you've spent hours thinking about it and it wasn't obvious at all until someone else had the idea. Gutter Love It struck me as being like that. It's a ridiculously simple idea that works.
Their approach is to take flexible drain pipe and stick it into your rain gutters. The corrugated edges of the drain pipe allow plenty of rain to go through on the edges, and the interior of the pipe stays clear of obstructions no matter what piles up on top of the pipe. Since it's drain pipe (i.e., designed to be stuck underground for decades), the durability is a given. And drain pipe doesn't have to be custom manufactured, so it's cheap. I can buy 100' of it at Home Depot for something like $30, and if I can get that kind of price on it, I'm sure someone who's buying a lot of it can probably get it for a lot less. So I had that installed in my gutters.
I considered just doing the job myself, but I thought the Gutter Love It company deserved my business for coming up with an idea that was obviously better and that I hadn't managed to think of on my own, and neither had any of the dozens of other companies selling various gutter protection products. It also turned out that there were numerous little techniques involved that I wouldn't have discovered on my own. There was also a little machine that flattened the drain pipe temporarily so that it could be forced into the gutter more easily, which I didn't have.
I've had Gutter Love It installed for a year, and it has worked great. We do have some leaves that have their stems stuck in the corrugated gaps, so some minor drain cleaning maintenance work is still required. But those don't block the flow of water through the pipe.
I should mention that I built a gardening shed after the Gutter Love It was installed, and since I had Gutter Love It on all my other gutters I installed drain pipe in the shed gutter so that all my gutters would be the same. It took me about an hour to do about 10' of gutter. It is a lot harder than it looks. I was really pleased that I had done it, though, until about a week ago when I figured out that the shed gutter hadn't actually been working all winter. The way I installed the drain pipe, the drain pipe itself was blocking the downspout opening. Oops! If I had tried to do gutters on the house myself I probably would have made that mistake on my whole house!
Resources
Gutter Love It: www.gutterloveit.com
Extensive Rain Gutter products web sites:
I'm splitting my blog into two blogs -- one focused on software development topics "10X Software Development" -- and one focused on personal topics -- "Waxing Philosophical." This is the personal blog, where I'll discuss:
- Car wax and other car detailing
- Gardening and landscaping
- Home theater
- Home improvement
- Life philosophy
and, occasionally, I might even blog about