No guard makes a gutter maintenance free

Start with the claim, because it is everywhere: never clean your gutters again. It is not true of any product on the market, it is not true of the expensive ones, and a company that leads with it has told you how the rest of the conversation is going to go.

Here is the true version. A well chosen, well fitted guard converts a miserable job into a minor one. Instead of pulling out packed, rotting, waterlogged debris twice a year, you are periodically brushing or rinsing a surface, and looking at the outlets. That is a genuine, worthwhile improvement. It is just not the same sentence as never.

What actually defeats a guard

Not leaves. Leaves are the easy case: they are large, they sit on top, and wind and rain move most of them along eventually. The problems are the small things.

Shingle granules and roof grit. An asphalt roof sheds mineral granules for its whole life and sheds them heavily in the first year and again as it ages out. Those granules are sand-sized. They do not sit on top of a micro-mesh, they settle into it, and a screen with its openings full of grit is not a screen any more, it is a lid. This is why a guard installed over an old roof frequently disappoints, and why it is worth fitting guards after a roof replacement rather than the year before one.

Pollen and seed. Spring in St. Louis puts an extraordinary amount of fine organic material on every horizontal surface. Maple seed, oak catkins and pine needles are particularly good at threading into or lying across mesh openings.

Shingle dust and tar. Fine dark material washing off an ageing roof binds the grit into a mat, which is the point where a screen stops passing water even though it looks reasonably clean from the ground.

The types, briefly and without favouritism

• Simple screens and drop-in mesh. Cheap, easy, keep out large leaves and squirrels. Coarse enough that fine material goes straight through into the trough, so you are still cleaning, just less often. Also the type most likely to blow out or lift under a hard rain if it is only resting in the trough.
• Micro-mesh over a frame. The type most worth having and the type most oversold. Very effective on leaves and needles. Vulnerable to blinding by grit and pollen as described above. Fitting matters enormously: the mesh has to be supported and pitched so water sheets off rather than pooling on it.
• Reverse curve or surface tension. Relies on water clinging around a curved nose while debris falls off the front. Works when it works. In very heavy rain, which is precisely the condition you care about, water arriving fast off a steep roof can overshoot the nose entirely. Also tends to be visible from the ground.
• Foam and brush inserts. Cheap, no fixings, and they do keep leaves out of the trough. They also hold moisture and collect fine sediment inside themselves, and pulling a saturated foam insert out of forty feet of gutter is not a better afternoon than cleaning the gutter was.

What good fitting looks like

The guard has to be secured so it cannot lift in wind or under a slug of water. It has to sit so that water running off the shingle lands on the guard and not behind it, because a guard that lets water get behind the gutter is worse than no guard at all. Where it meets the roof it must not be tucked so far under the shingles that it lifts the course above, which is a genuinely common installation fault and one that causes roof problems rather than gutter ones. And the outlets need to stay reachable, because when something does eventually block, it blocks at the outlet.

What to ask whoever is quoting you

Ask what happens when it does clog, and who comes. Ask whether the guard is fastened to the gutter or to the roof, and if it is going under the shingles, ask exactly how far. Ask what the maintenance is, in plain words, and be suspicious of the answer none. Ask how old your roof is, and if they do not know or do not ask, they are not thinking about granules.

Keys fits guards. Keys will also tell you when a guard is the wrong purchase for your house this year, which is a conversation that costs us a sale and saves you one.