How Often Should You Clean Your Gutters? Top Cleaning Tips

As a homeowner, it’s easy to overlook gutter maintenance, especially since it’s not the most fun afternoon activity. People tend to delay or forget to clean the drain or gutters until it’s too late. However, keeping your gutters clean is essential for a safe and long-lasting home. Failure to do so can result in severe and costly headaches. Continuous rainfall and freezing temperatures can lead to overflows or leaks if a gutter becomes clogged. Luckily, there are exceptional gutter cleaning services, to get the job done. Neglecting your gutters can lead to all kinds of damage to your roof, the outside of your house, and even your driveway. That’s why it’s important to know when and how often to clean your residential gutters to prevent disaster.

Importance Of Regular Gutter Cleaning Service

Cleaning and clearing both gutters and downspouts are a very important part of daily home maintenance. This helps to extend the life of roofs, windows, and partition walls. Gutter cleaning should be done 2-3 times a year, depending on the number of trees and leaves near your home.

What Happens If You Don’t Clean Your Gutters?

When it comes to gutters, everything can look good. Well, a lot of things can go wrong with the gutter. When you stop cleaning the commercial gutter, you suddenly realize that years have passed, and you have a big problem. If the gutter is not cleaned or maintained, it can become a damaged gutter that requires repair or replacement. However, it can be much worse than buying a new gutter and can damage other parts of your home like the roof, siding, etc.

• Roof Damage

If there’s one thing most homeowners don’t want to change, it’s the roof. This can be a destructive process. Therefore, to ensure that your roof is in good condition, you need to make sure that the gutter is in good condition. Leaving this gutter blocked could allow spilled water to seep into the roof. This can cause water leaks and damage the roof and interior of your home.

• Basement Flooding

Homeowners who have experienced basement flooding know it’s no fun. Gutters are a cause of basement flooding in your home. Rainwater will pour out of the gutter and collect on the floor of the house just above the basement. Over time, the foundation wears out and the water that builds upon it begins to seep into the basement. This can cause mold to grow and destroy paint, carpets, and other furniture or basement décor.

• Mold

If left uncleaned, the leaves that clog drains can begin to rot. In humid climates, mold develops and thrives, turning the exterior of drains black and dirty. To make matters worse, once this mold gets into your home, it can cause many health problems and can be expensive and inconvenient to get rid of.

When Should You Clean Your Gutters?

Most experts recommend inspecting gutters at least 1-2 times a year in the spring and fall seasons. But where you live also plays a role. If you live in a city, where it rains most of the year, you may need to do this more often to clean your gutters, especially if your home is near trees that often fall. Or, if you live in a city where winter temperatures drop below freezing, you should check your gutters just before winter to prevent water from freezing and damaging your roof.

• Spring Gutter Cleaning

Trees shed seed in the spring of each year, and sometimes flowers in the spring. Anyway, all those seem to go into your gutter system. If there is debris in the gutter, the seeds will germinate and begin to grow. This is one of the reasons why it is important to clean the gutter after spring. To ensure that all spring debris has been removed, it is generally recommended to wait until mid-June for the gutter to be cleaned. However, if you are sure that all local trees are down, you can start cleaning sooner.

• Summer Gutter Cleaning

July and August are the hottest and driest two months of the year, so trees don’t shed much debris and there is usually little rainfall. So basically, there isn’t much dirty work here. A caution in summer is that storms can damage gutters. In September, when the temperature finally starts to drop slightly, you can see small amounts of debris build up. But the tree did not even begin to shed real garbage. People who have a few trees in their yards should keep an eye on the gutter in the summer. It all depends on what kind of tree and how many trees there are. If leaves are starting to pile up in the gutter, it’s probably time.

• Fall Gutter Cleaning

Fall is the season to celebrate the beautiful changes in the greenery. This is because after the leaves change, they quickly fall off the plant and are blown away by the wind. Fall is perhaps the most important time for gutter cleaning. It may seem overwhelming, but the speed at which trees drop leaves can fool you until you find yourself in a gutter digging hard leaves out of the gutter. Gutters must be cleaned at least three times in the fall. Fall clean-up has several benefits. It also reduces weight, which can harm the tape hanging from the edge. Clearing the gutter in the fall can identify potential problems that may arise during the cold, windy months ahead.

• Winter Gutter Cleaning

You may need to clear your gutter in the winter if you’ve missed fall cleanup, or if you have trees that slowly shed debris. If a gutter full of debris is clogged, it will not drain properly. When it snows, the gutter fills with ice, which can cause it to fall or topple over. The most important tip is that debris will freeze inside the gutter and stick to it. You have to wait until the day the temperature drops below freezing. If there is ice, you won’t be able to clean it properly that day without damaging the gutter.