Straight answers, including the ones that cost us work

No. No guard on the market makes a gutter maintenance free, and a company that tells you otherwise is selling rather than explaining. What a good guard genuinely does is change the job: instead of pulling out packed wet debris twice a year, you are periodically brushing a surface and checking the outlets.

The material that defeats guards is not leaves, it is fines. Shingle granules, roof grit and spring pollen settle into a micro-mesh and blind it. That is why fitting guards over an old roof so often disappoints.

Sometimes. Often not. If they were cleaned recently and they still overshoot in every serious storm, the likelier answer is that the system cannot carry the flow. Steep roofs deliver water fast, and fast water goes over the front lip of a perfectly clean gutter.

Check whether it overflows everywhere along the run, which suggests capacity, or in one spot, which usually means a valley or an upper roof is dumping there.

No. It is bigger, which is only better if you need the capacity. On a modest house with shallow slopes and short runs it is money spent on capacity that will never be used, on a heavier profile that can look wrong on the fascia. The houses that need it have large steep planes, long runs, deep valleys concentrating into one point, or an upper roof discharging onto a lower one.

Usually the downspout, and it is not close. A two by three inch downspout is six square inches of opening; a three by four is twelve. The trough is a queue and the outlet is the door, and adding an outlet to an overloaded run is frequently cheaper and more effective than replacing the gutter.

Past the backfill zone, onto ground that falls away from the house. A splash block moves the discharge about eighteen inches, which is erosion control rather than drainage. Extensions do better. A buried line to daylight does it properly and is invisible once the sod knits back.

It is one of the common causes and by a wide margin the cheapest to correct. Backfill around a foundation is looser than undisturbed ground, so it takes water preferentially and delivers it to the footing. A downspout discharging a foot from the wall is putting a large volume into exactly that soil, repeatedly, for years.

Not every damp basement has that cause. But if the damp is concentrated in one area and there is a downspout on the outside of it, that is worth investigating before spending on anything expensive.

No. An ice dam forms at the cold roof edge when meltwater from a warm upper roof refreezes, and it would form on a house with no gutters at all. What the gutter does is give the ice somewhere to sit and then carry the weight of it.

The actual cause is heat escaping into the attic, so the actual fix is air sealing, insulation and ventilation. Removing your gutters will not stop ice dams and no gutter product prevents them.

In the straight runs, yes: it is formed on site from a coil and cut to length, so a forty foot elevation is one continuous piece. There are still joints at corners, end caps and outlets. The honest claim is that the number of sealed joints drops from many to a few, and the few that remain are visible and reachable.

If the run is sound aluminium, correctly sized, hung straight and simply weeping at a couple of joints, then yes, and it is a fraction of the cost. It will need doing again eventually. Replacement earns its money when the run is also undersized, sagging, or hung on spikes that have worked loose from a soft fascia board.

It depends entirely on what is over the house. What holds for everyone is the timing of the important one: after the last leaves are down and before the first hard freeze, which in this metro is usually somewhere in the back half of November. Clear earlier and the oaks will fill it again. Clear later and it is frozen in.

Testing the downspouts and the discharge. Put a hose in the top of each downspout and then go and confirm the water comes out where it is supposed to. On a buried line, go and stand at the outlet. That is how you find a silted underground run before a storm finds it for you.

Both. Keys does roofing, gutters and downspouts, and downspouts include reroutes, extensions and underground drainage to daylight. That combination is uncommon for a roofing company in this market, which is the reason this site exists. What Keys does not do is siding, windows, commercial work, waterproofing or excavation-scale yard drainage design.