As any property manager will know, gutter cleaning can be a huge drain on your maintenance staff’s time and productivity.
Depending on your property’s design and the vegetation and foliage around your premises, gutter cleaning may be a quarterly, monthly or even fortnightly task.
Of course, the threat of expensive flood damage from clogged gutters and downpipes means that not cleaning your gutters isn’t an option.
But with the right gutter mesh installed as a gutter guard, you can manage the risk of clogging and boost your workplace productivity by reducing the time staff need to spend on gutter cleaning.
How gutter mesh helps
Gutter mesh keeps leaves and debris out of your gutters while still letting rainwater in. On sloping roofs, it’s installed in line with your roof angle to create a slope that encourages leaf blow off.
By keeping leaves and debris out of your gutters, gutter mesh reduces the risk of clogging and flooding to your building – and thus reduces the need for frequent gutter cleaning.
This can offer a huge boost to your workplace productivity, especially if your maintenance staff currently spend several hours a week cleaning your gutters.
The maths
So just how much time can gutter mesh save for your maintenance staff?
The answer to this question varies for every property, but the formula for determining your annual gutter cleaning time is the same.
First, take the number of buildings your staff need to maintain and multiply it by the average time gutter cleaning takes (including time spent setting up and packing up). Multiply this by the number of staff required for cleaning and multiply again by the frequency of cleaning. This is your annual gutter cleaning time.
For a university campus with 15 buildings that each take three staff 2.5 hours to clean every fortnight, yearly gutter cleaning time is 2,925 hours.
What could your staff do with that time if they weren’t stuck regularly cleaning your gutters? (Or, if you use contractors for gutter cleaning, how quickly would the savings add up?)
Get the right mesh
Of course, to ensure you enjoy the productivity boosting benefits of gutter mesh, it’s important to select the mesh that’s best suited to your building/s and location.
The leaves and debris in your area may glide off one mesh, but get stuck in another. For this reason, you need to match your mesh for optimal results.
Blue Mountain Co’s Mesh Matcher tool asks 6 simple questions to match the right mesh to your building. You can find Mesh Matcher here.
Alternatively, custom advice is also available from our gutter mesh system designers. They can advise you on the right mesh for your building, or even help you develop a custom mesh solution.
