Video: Rain Gutter Maintenance

LOS ALTOS — Host, Sarah Rutan: When it comes to preventing water damage to your home, one crucial aspect is maintaining your rain gutters. Today we’re in Los Altos with Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Steve Spratt of HPS Palo Alto to learn more.

Diamond Certified Expert Contributor, Steve Spratt: So, there’s two or three places in every home that are critical to maintain to prevent water damage, and this is one of them. The rain gutter and downspout system in the home is critical to that. More damage is caused by rain gutters and downspouts that aren’t functioning properly than all the natural disasters in the United States combined. That’s huge. That’s a huge number if you think about it.

What happens is, if the water isn’t controlled coming off the roof then it can either splash back on the house, damage the doors, windows, siding. It also gets down too close to the foundation and soften the foundation, and you get settlement and cracking in the foundation. So, real critical to get that water controlled coming off the roof and channel it away from the structure where it can’t do any damage.

This particular gutter and downspout system are real nice because it’s Zinc, lasts a long time, and it’s easily demountable so that if it does get clogged up, you can take it apart. There’s a little screw mechanism here and a hinge so that if the joints where it connects can easily be taken apart without any tools. It also has this neat little trap door filter feature here, not only filters the water before it gets into the drain, but it makes it real easy to clean any debris out.

Now another thing, if you don’t have an easily maintainable system like this, is you just have to keep the trough of the gutter clean so that material doesn’t get down into the downspout – clog it up. One of the things you can do Is put a gutter protection system in along the roof line, in the gutter. And basically, those things keep the material from getting down into the trough of the gutter, but allow the water to pass through. That’s real important because if any part of this length gets clogged up then it will cause an overflow and you’re right back to square one.

Host, Sarah Rutan: To learn more from local top-rated companies, visit our Diamond Certified Expert Reports at experts.diamondcertified.org.