How to Improve Occupational Health & Safety with Gutter Mesh
Low-maintenance protection for your building & your people isn’t a pipe dream
Falls from height such as falls from ladders and roofs are one of the most common causes of work-related and DIY death and injury in Australia. On average, 19.4 Australians – mostly men aged over 50 – die every year after falling from a ladder. Thousands more are injured. Some are permanently disabled.
As an “at-height” activity, gutter maintenance poses both a significant residential safety and workplace health and safety risk, with a human and financial cost no family, organisation or building manager wants to bear. Bigger buildings and buildings that are prone to clogged gutters pose the greatest safety risks, as they require the most extensive or regular gutter cleaning.
Installing a gutter mesh gutter guard to keep leaves, animals and debris out of your gutters is a recognised solution for minimising gutter maintenance requirements and the safety risks that accompany this task.
How gutter mesh helps
Gutter mesh is installed over your gutters as a gutter guard to keep leaves, animals and debris out. On sloped roofs, it’s installed in line with your roof slope to maximise leaf blow-off.
By keeping your gutters virtually leaf- and debris-free, gutter mesh significantly reduces your gutter maintenance requirements. In turn, this reduces the risks of gutter maintenance for you, your family members or your staff. And as gutter maintenance becomes significantly less frequent, it’s also easier to justify hiring a professional to take care of the task for you.
It’s important to remember that for best results, you need to match your mesh to the size of the leaves in your area. While all gutter mesh still requires minimal maintenance, the wrong size mesh create an additional maintenance burden as leaves get stuck in the mesh or even pass through. Our free Mesh Matcher tool provides custom mesh recommendations for the right gutter mesh for your property based on leaf size and other key factors, so you can enjoy the benefits of minimal maintenance gutter mesh should entail. You can use Mesh Matcher now here.
Maintenance & safety case study
Low pitch roofs, large box gutters and overhanging gum trees created an ongoing maintenance problem for staff at the University of Southern Queensland Toowoomba campus.
Having previously experienced extensive and expensive flood damage to campus buildings and equipment due to blocked gutters, maintenance staff were required to climb up on roofs and clean out gutters once a fortnight – a significant working from heights risk.
The university consulted Blue Mountain Co to find a solution to this challenge and minimise staff safety risks. After discussing their needs and environment, we recommended that they install our 2mm Steel gutter mesh. The installation has significantly reduced gutter maintenance requirements at the campus, in turn reducing health and safety risks for maintenance staff. (Read about this case study in more detail here.)
