Clean/Repair/Improve Gutters - PEP BB homesteading.sand.big.gutters

Ok, it was the last nice day of the fall so I did the roof jobs.  Sweeping the chimney and cleaning the gutters.  I didn't clean the gutters last year and this year I had an 8" sapling growing in the gutter along with some nice microgreens

I have built a hugel and raised beds and a pollinator garden, but the plants growing from my gutter are unintentional.









I will say that when you go up a ladder, there is a tipping point.  It goes from "La La la, no problem" to "holy shit I am going to die."  Also I've cleaned the gutters the other way, being on the roof and scooping them from the top down, and I will take the ladder thank you.  Also I'm pissed because I unthinkingly covered my oregano patch in a 3 inch thick layer of guttery pine needle sludge.  I've had that patch for 5 years and now I'm not sure I'm comfortable eating any oregano from it.  Although I suppose the roof runs off to it anyway.

Here is my submission for the Homesteading - Sand - Clean/Repair/Improve Gutters BB.

To document the completion of the BB, I have provided the following:
  - a before picture of the gutters
  - an in progress picture of cleaning/repairing/improving the gutters
  - a picture after cleaning/repairing/improving the gutters

Went to inspect the gutter when I noticed the floor in the shed was wet.  The gutter had separated and was not diverting water away from the shed and into the garden.

The property I purchased had three structures, each of which needed gutters cleaned.  FREE COMPOST, YAY!!

I'm going to remove some of my gutters this spring. I have a wrap-around verandah around three sides of the house, so it protects much of the foundation from rain off the roof. The property slopes down from the house. The eavetroughs aren't properly graded with downspouts in the proper places, so I get rain pouring out of the gutters right by the front door, among other problems. I think I'm going to make a short one, maybe eight feet long, on the verandah roof in front of the door, slightly graded to one downspout. Same with the side-back doors. No more cleaning gutters!

With over four inches of rain in the last four days, this corner of the gutter has a downspout and was getting plugged and overflowing,  so time to do some gutter maintenance.

We've been having an inordinate amount of mosquitoes. I've been systematically addressing every possible vector. Finally getting to a big one - gutters.

It's hard to take good pictures when you're on a roof. Priority one is not falling off.

The gutters here are covered, had to do a lot of screwing and unscrewing to get in there.

Did my spring roof and gutter cleaning today.

All day yesterday and most of this morning we had a torrential downpour. As I was in the kitchen I noticed a heavy drip by the back door: the gutter had filled up with moss and sediment. When the rain stopped, on my lunch break, I decided to clear them out.

I scooped out all of the silt, sediment and moss into a bucket (it's actually a peanut butter container from the trash). These went on the garden as it makes a good soil conditioner. There are little bits of gravel from the pebble dash on this house (which I find ugly and annoying, but it is rented so there isn't much I can do) but it wont be a problem in the garden. I then used a cloth and some water to rinse the sediment away.

The snow is not nice on our gutters here. This job has been waiting a while, but fixed it today.

It is perhaps not very visible on the photos, but the gutter is twisted down a bit, and when it rains, it overflows in the middle. It has also not been cleaned out in a while, but that part was not as bad as expected.

Problem gutter number 1 - it’s not even connected and the bottom just dumps water next to the house. This has leaked into the basement over many years before we bought the place causing extensive damage.





I reconnected the top section and screwed into place.



I also screwed the pipe to every wall bracket - the pipe was free to move up and down, which is why it was detached in the first place. Here’s a picture with a new screw inplace.



I will collect all the rain water in some kind of water storage solution yet to be decided and budgeted for. For now, I’m adding drainage pipes to take the water to my future food forest. To avoid the pipes silting up, I need to divert debris, so I installed a downspout filter connecting to the drainage pipe.





Problem gutter number 2. Yesterday we had the first significant rain for many months. I went out to see if there were any other problems that need immediate attention. I noticed one section was overflowing. When I inspected, the downspout was totally blocked.



I removed a couple of sections and it was totally jammed up with ‘soil’.



The rest of the gutter needed cleaning out.



Here’s everything cleaned out:





I then went ahead and installed a downspout filter and attached to my garden drain.


Before


After

Had to remove some Christmas lights left over from previous residents, and decided to clean the gutters and perhaps earn a BB while at it.  Rather than only cleaning the gutters, I figured I might as well prune the troublemaking limbs above, too!

*Edited to add downspout cleaning and replacement.

One of the houses on our land has been gathering lots of gunk in the gutters as well as having some pieces needing a good mend.
Guttering time!
Most was done by moving ladder, ascending, de-gunking, descending, moving ladder. Rinse, repeat. Brushing where I couldn`t quite reach, spraying with the hose to blow the rest into the downpipes. Most of the gunk went into a tub to join a compost somwhere. Much fun was had, as standing in ladders doing work makes me tingle a bit. In a good, but still decent way, of course.