What is a gutter actually for?
It moves water away from the two places you cannot afford to have it: the wood at the edge of your roof, and the ground against your foundation.
When it stops doing that, the gutter is rarely the thing that gets damaged. The fascia behind it goes soft. The soffit stains. Water sheets down the siding and finds a window frame. At the bottom, it drops in one spot beside the house, over and over, until the soil there is doing something different from the soil everywhere else.
That is why a sagging gutter is worth dealing with in the fall rather than the following spring. The gutter itself is inexpensive. What it protects is not.
Why do gutters overflow when they are not clogged?
Because clogging is only one of four reasons, and it is the one everybody checks first.
- Pitch. A gutter needs a slight fall toward the downspout. Hung level, or sagged into a dip between hangers, it holds water and spills over the front edge in the same spot every storm.
- Capacity. A large roof plane feeding a single small downspout will overwhelm it in a hard Georgia downpour no matter how clean it is.
- Seams and end caps. Sectional gutters leak at the joints as the sealant ages. The drip looks like overflow from the ground and is not.
- Roof edge detail. Without drip edge, water can cling to the shingle edge and run behind the gutter entirely, which is the leak that rots fascia while the gutter stays dry.
Telling these apart takes a look during or right after rain, which is when we would rather come out for a gutter call.
Is it the gutter or the wood behind it?
This is the question that decides the job, and it is worth answering before anyone quotes you new gutters.
Gutters hang off the fascia board. If water has been getting behind them for a couple of seasons, that board is soft, and screws driven into soft wood will pull out again. Rehanging good gutters on bad fascia is the most common way this work gets done twice.
We check the board before we price the gutter. Sometimes the answer is that the gutters are fine and the wood is not. That is a smaller conversation than a full replacement, and it is the honest one.
Downspouts, and where the water actually goes
A downspout that empties at the base of the wall has moved the problem four feet, not solved it. Extensions, splash blocks, and running the discharge out past the foundation line are the cheap part of the job and the part most often skipped.
In older Rome neighborhoods we also find downspouts tied into clay drain lines that stopped working years ago, which backs water up under the slab side of the house. If yours disappears into the ground and you have never seen it come out anywhere, that is worth checking.
Gutter guards, honestly
Under pines and oaks, guards genuinely reduce how often somebody has to get on a ladder, and around Floyd County that is most houses.
They are not maintenance-free. Fine debris still builds on top, and pine needles in particular will bridge across almost any screen. Anyone selling you a system you will never touch again has not cleaned one in March. What guards buy is fewer trips, not zero.
When a tree takes the gutter with it
This is the overlap that most companies cannot cover. A limb through a gutter almost always took a section of roof edge or fascia with it, and sometimes more.
A gutter contractor cannot remove the limb. A tree crew will get the limb off and leave the gutter hanging in the yard.
We do both with the same crew on the same day, which is the reason storm damage restoration and tree removal sit on the same truck here. If the roof itself opened up, emergency tarping comes first and the gutter goes back after.