My Mind's in the Gutter

The trees around the house litter. The existing gutters are unprotected, so they fill with needles, roof granules, and other debris. I bought some plastic screening and tried it out.

The plastic could be lower if I cut out around the gutter supports

The plastic just plain didn't work, because the debris just collected where the barrel vault hit the fascia.

I tried about 20' of the plastic, but you can see how the debris collects

There are many, many products on the market to solve this, including an open-cell foam that fills the gutter so that there's no room for the leafs. The water trickles through the foam. LeafGuard(tm) quoted me $11,000 years ago, if memory serves. That's $42.80/LF.

Hoover Dam

What people seem to like best is a product called Hoover Dam, from Amerimax. Home Depot sells 3' sections for $4.97. $1.66/LF, or $426 for the whole house. The plastic netting I tried first is about .23/LF, 14% of the cost.

Kevin has a hard plastic shell on his gutters. Water runs off toward the house, and a single groove lets it fall into the gutter. One thing that the Hoover Dam literature says is--if you have a dark roof and a light fascia, install dark Hoover Dam.

I installed Hoover Dam where I can watch it from the Kitchen

The shadow line on the little fake gable end is a small edge flashing, so the larger edge flashing I put on top of it looks a little stupid. More so because none of it is fastened down--the larger edge would look better if it was tight against the older edge. I haven't fastened the Hoover Dam, either. It gets two screws in front of each 3' section.

I'm planning to take the existing gutters down, in sections, to replace rotting fascia and other wood and to correct the slope of the gutters. They angle down to the corners because the entire roof sags at most of the outside corners. That's a particular problem outside BR2, where collected gutter water dripped constantly on the deck boards right where I put my foot through it.