Gutters may be one of the least considered features on any building, but they’re actually one of your home’s unsung heroes.
Intact, properly functioning gutters ensure that the rainwater that lands on your roof is directed away from your home, providing protection against flooding and other threats. Conversely, damaged or improperly functioning gutters can exacerbate your flooding risk and even increase your susceptibility to other threats such as pest invasion and bushfire.
Many of these gutter-related problems are caused by leaves collecting in your gutters after falling from trees around your home. As such, gutter maintenance, repair and replacement are generally necessary expenses if you want to ensure your gutters are kept leaf-free so they protect rather than endanger your home. But with gutter mesh you can actually reduce and minimise these costs without jeopardising your home.
Gutter Cleaning Costs
Leaves and other debris often congregate in your gutters, leading to blockages and clogging. In a best case scenario, this clogging simply slows the flow of rainwater from your roof. More often than not, however, it causes expensive flood damage to your home, which is why for any home, gutter cleaning is necessary to prevent clogging and the expensive threats it poses.
Gutters on homes that are surrounded by trees or located in leafy suburbs often require cleaning every three months. However, at approximately $250 a pop for professional gutter cleaning, this is a cost that quickly adds up.
DIY gutter cleaning may be financially less expensive than professional cleaning, but it comes with its own hidden costs – in particular, the risk of injury or even death from a ladder fall. Home ladder accidents are the most common DIY accident leading to hospitalisation and death, especially for men aged over 50, so DIY cleaning isn’t really a cost-reducing answer.
Rust & Replacement Costs
Replacing rusted gutters is a necessary expense, as rust renders your gutters ineffective and even dangerous. This means that preventing rust is a key way to save on replacement costs and spend less money over time.
All metal gutters are ultimately subject to some degree of corrosion and rusting, but environmental conditions heavily impact the rate at which this occurs. In particular, the presence of water in your gutters accelerates corrosion and rusting.
Because water is a corrosion accelerator, one of the most effective ways to slow the rate of rusting in your gutters is to minimise the time water spends in them. Clogging due to leaf build-up or pests can slow the rate of drainage from your gutters or even cause pools of water to collect in them. Unsurprisingly, unmaintained, leaf-clogged gutters that fill up with water in this manner have a higher incidence of rust.
Minimising These Costs
By preventing leaves and other debris from entering your gutters in the first place, you can significantly reduce the need for gutter cleaning around your home and minimise rusting in your gutters. In turn, this lowers the likelihood that you’ll be faced with massive bills for repairs for gutter-related damage from floods, pests and bushfire.
Less serious damage, less cleaning and less rust also means less money spent on maintenance, replacement and repairs. And that means more money for you and your family to spend as you please.
Best of all, the secret to achieving this outcome is simple: installing the appropriate over-the-gutter gutter mesh for your home and location.
How Gutter Mesh Reduces Your Costs
Over-the-gutter gutter mesh forms a physical barrier over your gutters that prevents leaves and other debris from entering your gutters and clogging them up. In turn, this provides year-round, low-maintenance protection for your home, minimising the risk of clogged gutters and helping to minimise the rate of rusting. All of which saves you big $$$.
Of course, no gutter protection system is entirely maintenance-free, and no metal gutter will remain rust-free forever.
However, gutter mesh significantly reduces how frequently your gutters require cleaning, ultimately making professional cleaning more affordable and saving you thousands of dollars in potential repair bills. Similarly, by helping to ensure the optimal flow of water through your gutters, gutter mesh helps bring the rate of rusting in your gutters down to a minimum so that they require replacement more infrequently.
Selecting the Appropriate Gutter Mesh for Your Home
Leaves are one of the most common causes of clogged gutters, so it’s important that the gutter mesh you use for your home is matched to the leaves in your environment.
Gutter mesh with a larger aperture (hole size) can easily keep out larger leaves and debris, but is ineffective at keeping smaller leaves out of your gutters. As such, it’s important that you consider the size of the leaves around your home when selecting the right gutter mesh for you.
Blue Mountain Co’s Mesh Matcher tool asks the right questions to help you choose the most appropriate gutter mesh for your property. In addition to considering leaf size, it also addresses other key factors including your home’s roofing materials, bushfire risk and more. Mesh Matcher is free, easy-to-use and will give you the confidence you need to select the right mesh for your home.
