As winter turns to spring, you’ll have a list of seasonal chores to complete to ensure that your home is being cared for properly. Spring cleaning chores include cleaning and dusting around appliances and hard to reach areas inside the home, sealing up small cracks or holes opened up in walls, doors, or windows, and sweeping out and spraying down your garage floor after a long and dirty winter season.
These are all important chores, but you always must make sure that you’re adding cleaning out your rain gutters to your annual spring cleaning list.
Here are some primary reasons why it’s essential to clean your gutters.
Prevent Damaging Your Rain Gutters
Over the course of the fall and the winter, a bunch of stuff accumulates in your gutters. Dirt, sticks, leaves, debris, insects, critters, ice, moisture. Each of these things can cause damage to your gutters if they’re allowed to spend a prolonged period of time in your gutters.
When gutter cleaning is ignored, all of these things that build up will cause your home’s rain gutters to become clogged. Clogged gutters create a number of issues. First of all, clogs prevent your gutters from accomplishing their primary goal which is to channel out the water and precipitation that flows from your roof into your gutters. Secondarily, when clogs are preventing water from flowing through your gutters and safely away from your home, water will build up which can lead to rust. Rust eventually can wear down your gutters to the point of breaking.
If you want to avoid replacing portions of your rain gutter system, or potentially the entirety of your rain gutter system, a quick and easy spring cleaning is a great way to prevent your rain gutters from damage.
Damaged Gutters = Damaged Home
When your gutters become damaged and require replacement or repairs, it’s a pricey and unfortunate situation. However, it can be much worse. In addition to your gutters, your home can be damaged as a consequence of dirty gutters. As mentioned in the section above, when your rain gutters don’t channel water properly away from your home, that water either builds up in your gutters, or remains on your roof. In both of these scenarios, that water can get into your structure of your home.
The most common place the water will find a way into your home is in the vulnerable cracks and seals. When the water enters, water damage, mold, and mildew can follow closely behind. If the damage to your gutters occurs further along in the channeling process, your home’s foundation is in jeopardy. Water can build up near the perimeter of your home, which can seep into the basement of your home and damage the foundation.
Insects & Critters
A dirty rain gutter that is filled with debris is a hotbed for insects and critters to hang out. Once you have insects and critters hanging around in your gutters, it won’t take very long for these intuitive little nuisances to find access to your home. Any homeowner that has dealt with an insect or critter issue in their home can tell you how big of a pain it can be.
By cleaning out your rain gutters every spring, your gutters won’t be as appealing for critters and insects to hang out and scout entry points into your home.
Protect the Paint on Your Home
In many cases, when water backs up due to blocked gutters, it starts to trickle down or drip over the sides of your home. Not only does this pose a threat to your roof and foundation, the moisture can pose a threat to the paint that makes your stand out. Backed up water trickling causes damage to your paint job over time as the paint starts to flake away under the abuse of the moisture.
If your gutters are not clean, the water will wear away and damage your home’s paint job, which will require you to climb up a high ladder and touch up the spots with fresh paint.
Prevent Against Ice Dams
Ice dams are an very relevant and nasty issues homeowners need to watch out for here in Minnesota where our winters are persistently long and relentlessly frigid. What are ice dams? Gutters that are not cleaned regularly become clogged, which means they’ll house water in them. Once winter rolls around, that water freezes. Over time throughout the long winter, that frozen piece of water will build and create a large chunk of ice, called an ice dam.
Ice dams create a large obstruction in the ability of your roof and gutter system to channel water away from your home. This greatly increases the chances that the water trapped beneath, on, and near the location of the ice dam will seep into your home and wreck havoc.
Clean Your Gutters this Spring with Gutter Maids
Without a regular rain gutter cleaning, your gutter system and your home are at risk for a number of pesky issues. Keep your house protected this spring by giving us a call. We’d love to give your rain gutter and roof a full inspection and cleaning, so you’ll be able to rest easy and enjoy the weather this spring and summer. Contact the 5-star rated gutter company today.