The Dangers Of Not Maintaining Rain Gutters On Your Home

Eavestroughs, rain gutters – call them whatever you want, they’re a huge part of your home that you don’t give enough attention to!

We rarely think about our gutters but they play big roles in keeping our homes in great condition. Moreover, poorly maintained gutters can lead to a host of problems that’ll hit your bank balance hard. 

What does a badly maintained gutter look like? In essence, it’s dirty and full of junk. You could see leaves and other things in there, possibly with mold or moss growing on the inside. It’s not a good look – but aside from damaging your home’s aesthetics, bad gutter maintenance can cause the following: 

Broken Gutters

When a gutter isn’t regularly cleaned, loads of stuff builds up in there. This might begin as a small bit of dirt, followed by a leaf or two. After a few months, you’ve got loads of dirt and debris in there, which weighs down the guttering system. Before you know it, the weight of the debris is too much and your gutters can strain and break. 

This leaves you with damaged gutters at the best – or damage to other parts of your house at the worst. If a gutter falls and swings down it could scratch or crack windows, causing more costly repairs. That’s why eavestrough cleaning is important to remove all of the gunk and stop your gutters from becoming too weighed down and weak. 

Leaky Roofs

A small bit of build-up in your gutters is enough to cause major roofing issues. All it needs is a tiny amount of leaves or dirt to block the flow of water through the eavestrough system. If this happens during a bout of heavy rain, the water will start filling the gutters and overflow onto the roof. Even worse, there’s nowhere for the rain to flow from the roof – which is the whole purpose of gutters. 

Instead, rainwater pools on the roof tiles and sits there for hours. It can seep through the cracks and get into your roof, causing serious leaks. This leads to expensive water damage in your home that may cost thousands of dollars to fix. 

Pests

One of the least known dangers of badly maintained gutters is that they attract pests. Birds or rodents can use your gutters to make nests. After all, the gutter has done most of the hard work for them by collecting leaves and other debris. You absolutely do not want a bird making a nest on your roof as they’ll lay eggs and stay there for ages. It’s even worse if rodents get up there as they’ll sniff out food and try to get into your bins – or inside the home itself. 

If you’re not careful, you’ll have a pest infestation on your hands! This costs money to deal with – not to mention the damage a pest can potentially cause to your property by chewing through electrical wires, etc. 

The moral of the story is to maintain your gutters as you’d maintain any other part of your home. It’s not hard to do and you will avoid all of the major issues noted in this post.