How to Clean Your Gutters

Cleaning your gutters is one of the easiest home-owner tasks to overlook. They are mostly out of sight, which can easily mean they’re out of mind. To keep your roofing systems running properly, it’s a necessary chore to complete. The best news is that it’s not hard to clean gutters! Follow along for a step-by-step process on how to clean your gutters.

Why it’s important

Before we start with the steps, you need to understand why having clean gutters is so important. Gutters help to protect a lot of things that have to do with your home. It’s easy to see that gutters protect your home’s landscaping and siding, but it does much more than just that. The work goes all the way down to your home’s foundation. If your gutter is filled with all kinds of sticks and debris, this can cause clogs which could result in water making its way under the roof and sometimes down into the foundation. You should be cleaning your gutters a minimum of once a year, but it is beneficial to do so more often.

Let’s get to cleaning

Now that you have a better understanding of why gutter cleaning is so important, it’s time to get into exactly how you can do that. With a few simple and easy steps, your gutters will be clean in no time!

Step one: Make sure you’re as prepared as you can be because you don’t want to constantly be climbing up and down off of your ladder to get your necessary things. Make sure your ladder is sturdy and placed in a safe spot. If possible, it’s best to have a helper with you in case you drop something or need help adjusting the ladder. 

Step two: This job could get pretty messy depending on how long it’s been since your gutter was last cleaned. It is recommended that you wear a long-sleeve shirt, pants and some sort of rubber gloves to protect yourself from the dirty job ahead.

Step three: Save time and even more cleaning by placing a tarp underneath where you’ll be cleaning. This is so it can collect all of the gunk you’ll remove from your gutter without throwing it down in your yard. This helps to protect landscaping and makes the clean-up process much easier.  

Step four: Start by removing all of the gunk that has accumulated in your gutters. You can get this done using anything sturdy that you can find, but there are actual gutter-cleaning tools that are made for this purpose. You can find yourself a gutter scoop at most hardware stores, but smaller children’s toy shovels could work as well. 

Step five: After you’ve done the work of removing the gunk from the gutters, pull up a garden hose to wash out any remaining gunks of debris. Since you did most of the hard work in the last step, this step should be a lot easier in removing the smaller spots and could also possibly help you identify a leak. 

Step six: By this step, you’re pretty much done. This is a perfect time to inspect your gutters to make sure there’s no damage you missed at any point during the process and fix it if you do find a problem. Check for any sagging metal or holes in your gutters. Most of the gutter repairs you can find are easily fixable tasks that can be performed on your own.

You’re done!

That’s pretty much it! Finish by cleaning up your supplies and the gunk you removed onto the tarp, and enjoy the benefits of a clean gutter system! It’s a simple task that makes a huge difference to your home. Once you get the hang of it, it is one of the easy chores on the list you’ll want to check off first. For any assistance with gutter cleanings, guards or repairs, call us at Blanco AC.