The eavestrough is an essential aspect of your home’s structure. However, this section is among the most neglected parts of a house. Homeowners overlook cleaning and maintaining their eavestrough, leading to more extensive and costly repairs.
A well-maintained eavestrough ensures your home remains safe during heavy rain and prevents issues such as mildew growth and pest infestation. Although maintaining and repairing your eavestrough is relatively easy, there are things you should do and avoid.
Table of Contents
The Dos
As already stated, there are things to do and avoid when repairing eavestrough. Among the dos include:
Do Hire Professionals
While it’s tempting to perform eavestrough repairs yourself, it’s highly discouraged as you likely don’t have the right equipment and training to execute the repairs. Also, if you don’t understand how your eavestrough system works, you could do more damage. Additionally, lacking the proper safety training to operate at height can lead to ladder falls, which can be fatal. Therefore, to avoid such incidents, visit this website to hire experts who can successfully repair your eavestrough.
There are plenty of benefits for hiring professionals for eavestrough repairs. For instance, professionals identify problems in their early stages and repair them before they escalate. Professionals also avoid roof damage by spotting underlying issues and recommend solutions to ensure your roof’s longevity. Experts are licensed and insured, meaning you’ll likely be compensated if your property gets damaged after performing maintenance or repairs.
Do Have A Sturdy Ladder
Before starting any eavestrough repairs, use a strong and stable ladder because these repairs are done at a height. Many individuals end up in emergency rooms due to ladder falls. Therefore, using a functional ladder and following ladder safety guidelines makes sense.
Before using ladders, ensure the ground is even and leveled to enhance the ladder’s stability. Additionally, remember to inspect the ladder before use because if the feet, rungs, or stiles are missing or damaged, there’s a high risk of the ladder slipping or breaking.
Furthermore, when using a ladder, ensure to keep three points of contact. This is the most crucial rule that ensures ladder safety. Keeping three points of contact means having two feet and a single hand on the ladder or two hands and one foot on the ladder. Most falls occur when an inexperienced homeowner takes both hands off the ladder.
Do Remove Debris Around The Eavestrough
Removing all the dirt and debris accumulated in the system is essential when repairing or replacing your gutter system. This helps you get as much contact with the gutters as possible, making it easier to spot minor issues such as cracks and holes. If you don’t remove the debris, it accumulates and clogs your gutters and downspout, causing water to overflow.
The Don’ts
The following are things to avoid when repairing an eavestrough:
Don’t Ignore Minor Repairs
Many homeowners turn to repair their eavestrough when issues escalate. However, this is discouraged as the repairs are usually more expensive than replacing the whole system. To ensure your eavestrough’s longevity, avoid ignoring minor gutter issues. Instead, repair them early before they become more significant problems. Some of the issues you shouldn’t ignore include:
- Cracks, rust spots, dents, bends, or holes in your eavestrough
- Spaces or gaps between junctions and connections
- When your eavestrough is sagging or starting to pull away from the house
- Eavestrough overflowing during rainfall
- Patches of mold and mildew growth
- Water leaks from some parts of the gutters
- Standing water in the gutters even after the rain has stopped
Generally, if minor issues aren’t addressed immediately, be ready to face more significant problems in the future.
Don’t Use Too Many Seams
Many homeowners think using many seams is ideal for an eavestrough system. However, it’s the opposite. Seams are usually more fragile, and using too many on your gutters weakens connections and junctions, causing them to separate from each other.
Additionally, seams crack, leak, and get clogged quickly, making them a challenging area to operate on when doing repairs. Moreover, seams are welded together, so if you weld them incorrectly, they’re more likely to separate. Therefore, ensure to use as few seams as possible or purchase seamless gutters.
Don’t Lean Your Ladder Against Gutters
When repairing your gutters, avoid resting the ladder heavily against the eavestrough because it can cause the eavestrough to bend or seams to separate from each other. The ladder can also cause cracks or scratch the gutter’s finish. Therefore, always use a standoff as a barrier between the ladder and the eavestrough.
Conclusion
Eavestrough repairs are among the most overlooked projects in a home. For this reason, many homeowners don’t know how to tackle these repairs. Hopefully, with the information provided above, you now understand the dos and don’ts of eavestrough repairs.
