In order not to risk moisture damage to your house, you should regularly clean your gutter of dirt. Tips to help keep rain pipes and drain clean.
Many households are currently undergoing spring cleaning. Of course, the annual cleaning campaign does not only include the living rooms including the attic and basement. Even outside the house and in the garden, everything has to be properly repaired after the cold winter months. But unfortunately, when working on the façade, it is often forgotten what does not immediately catch the eye. Among other things, the cleaning of the gutter is far too often neglected by homeowners.
In individual cases, however, this can cause major damage to the house. This is because if the water can no longer drain properly after rainfall and overflows, the walls of the house are permanently exposed to moisture. This can result in major renovations. Experts therefore advise removing dirt and debris from the gutter on the house at least twice a year. To ensure that the maintenance of rain pipes is quick and easy in the future, we have compiled the most important tips and tricks for gutter cleaning for you here.
Why should you clean your gutter?
The gutter on the house ensures that the water can drain properly during rainfall and does not simply pour over the walls of the house. In residential areas, proper handling of rainwater is of great importance, since extreme humidity can lead to instability in the foundation or external walls. In extreme cases, a house can even become uninhabitable in this way. If dirt or leaves accumulate in the gutter, the downspouts can become clogged and the water will no longer drain as intended. When it rains, the gutter overflows accordingly, and the walls of the house are constantly exposed to moisture.
You should clean © your gutter at least twice a year ingimage/Imago
This not only harms the aesthetics of the property, as plaster or paint may peel off. Damp house walls can cause many problems such as mold, lack of insulation or even cracks in the façade. This is one of the reasons why you should regularly check the proper functioning of your gutter.
Another nuisance with clogged rain pipes is damage to the gutter itself. If the water no longer drains completely and instead accumulates, the gutter can burst in frost. In winter, overflowing water also leads to icicles, which pose a danger to local residents.
What is needed to clean the gutter and what to look out for?
In the vast majority of cases, you don't need to hire a specialist to clean your gutter. If you regularly remove dirt and debris from the gutter, you can easily clean it yourself, as it is not a particularly big effort.
At best, clean the gutters on the roof twice a year, for example in spring and autumn. Especially before the onset of the cold season, you should make sure that foliage has not accumulated that could clog the pipes in snow and frost. How often you should ultimately clean the gutter on your house also depends on a few other factors. For example, is it a flat roof or a pitched roof? Are there deciduous trees in the immediate vicinity of the house or do plants such as vines or ivy even grow on the façade of the house itself? What about the annual rainfall in your residential area? All these aspects must be taken into account when planning gutter cleaning.
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Of course, it is also important that you have the right working material at hand for cleaning. In most cases, a bucket, a coarse brush and a decent cleaning cloth are sufficient for this. When choosing your ladder, you should make sure for safety reasons that it is particularly stable and at least one meter higher than the gutter.
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This is the best way to proceed when cleaning the gutter
With the right equipment, cleaning the gutter should actually be quite easy for you. First of all, the downpipe must be covered so that the loosened dirt does not fall into it and possibly cause blockages. After removing the coarse accumulations of foliage and moss by hand, you can loosen the remaining debris with a brush and collect it in a bucket. Use a wet cloth to wipe the gutter clean again at the end.
Once you've cleared the entire gutter, open the downspout again and use a bucket of water to check that everything drains properly. If this is not the case, it is very likely that leaves and dirt have accumulated and led to a blockage. There are different tools for cleaning the downpipe, such as a telescopic rod with brush or a so-called drain cleaning cable, as it is also used to clean clogged drain pipes in the bathroom. If you don't have one of them, you can also make your own tools: simply cut open a plastic bottle and attach it to a string or a piece of wire. You can then easily pull half the bottle through the downpipe from above and loosen the dirt in this way.
