Benefits of Properly Installed Gutters
The gutters on your home can be easy to take for granted because it seems as though all they do is catch rain water. But when you examine your gutters closely, you start to realize that they have several important functions that help to retain the investment you have made in your home. When you put all of the information together, it becomes immediately apparent that gutters are extremely important to your home and your family.
Gutters Protect Your Home’s Foundation
The key to understanding the importance of gutters lies in understanding the potential damage that rain water can do over time. Your gutters collect rain water as it falls and move that water away from your home and its foundation through the use of downspouts and extensions.
If the rain water were allowed to fall freely from your roof, it would start to erode your concrete foundation and the ground the foundation sits on. Without gutters, your foundation would become weak and start to crack, which would create an extremely expensive home repair situation.
Gutters Prevent Your Home From Becoming Unsettled
A home that is properly designed has all of the ground around the foundation sloping away from the home to prevent water from building up. But a properly graded lawn is not enough to protect your home if the rain water is not properly collected and moved away from your home’s foundation.
As we mentioned earlier, water that is allowed to pour off your roof and onto the ground will make the ground around your home unstable. Without gutters, the water will create channels around the foundation of your home that will consistently get filled whenever it rains. Over time, these channels will destabilize the ground around your home and cause your home to shift, which can cause further damage to your foundation.
Protecting Your Windows And Doors
One of the functional aspects of gutters that is easy to take for granted is how gutters prevent rain water from pouring directly down the facade of a home and damaging the home’s wood frame. If you did not have gutters on your home, then the rain water would simply cascade down your home’s siding and start getting into your window and door frames. Over time, the damage would be tremendous and there could also be a build up of mold that would only compound the problem.
Unsightly Staining
These days, rain water has the potential to carry chemicals and other materials that could stain just about anything. Without gutters, that tainted rain water would fall directly onto your siding, porch, and deck to leave behind stains that would never go away.
Prevent Basement Flooding
To this point, we have discussed how gutters move water away from your house and prevent damage to your foundation. But we have not discussed another immediate effect of not having gutters and that would be basement flooding. Without gutters to move the rain water away from your home, the only place the water would have to go would be your basement. The more it rains, the more flooded your basement gets and the more damage items such as your furnace and water heater sustain.
Gutters Should Always Be Professionally Installed
Too many homeowners try to save money on gutter installation by doing it themselves and they wind up creating more issues and problems. There are two significant reasons why your home gutters should only be installed by a professional and experienced contractor.
The first reason a professional should install your gutters is proper placement of the right materials. It is important that gutters be placed at the right spots on your roof and it is equally important to utilize the right gutter parts to make sure the water flows properly. A professional would know exactly where to install gutters on a home and what pieces to use to get the job done right.
The other aspect of gutter installation that requires a professional’s touch is pitching the gutters properly. Every gutter must be installed on an incline known as a pitch to make sure that the water is always flowing where it needs to go. In more complicated gutter installations, pitch is extremely important and should only be determined by a professional.
Your gutters quietly do a lot of important work to protect your home. Always maintain your gutters properly and be sure to bring in a professional when it is time to install new gutters on your home.