EXTERIORS : Time to Put Your Mind on the Gutter

You thought you were lucky. Last summer you finally had a new roof put on your home, and, in the torrential winter rains, your ceilings stayed dry. But when you stepped out the front door, you were drenched.

The rain gutter above your door overflowed like a cheap fountain, and you found a few choice words from the gutter to express your displeasure. As with your windshield wipers and your furnace filter, it’s easy to forget about your home’s gutter system, especially when the weather’s nice.

“It’s definitely a seasonal business,” says Mark Cilani of Rain Gutter Supply in Orange. “In summer, no one puts much thought into their gutters. But in rainy seasons, business booms.”

Last winter’s record storms pushed most gutters to the limit, and those that had had the benefit of a little care probably were up to the task.

While some people might think of a functional rain gutter as a needless accessory--why not just walk out the door with your umbrella open?--gutters serve an important purpose.

Water that rolls off your roof and onto the perimeter of your house can seep down and damage your home’s foundation. And as it falls from the shingles, a good downpour can ruin expensive landscaping.

“When you look at a house and the stucco is brown from the ground up to two or three feet, you know there’s a problem with the gutters,” Cilani says. “The water is rushing down the roof, hitting the soil and splashing back up.”

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Modern rain gutters are generally made of aluminum, galvanized metal, vinyl or copper. Vinyl gutters are relatively easy to install and are designed for the do-it-yourselfer. Vinyl gutters are also known for their quiet operation.

However, vinyl doesn’t have a reputation for standing up to the elements as well as other materials. “It expands and contracts depending on the weather, which makes it crack over time,” says gutter installer Jay Pantal of Fountain Valley. “It needs to be installed exactly according to the directions, or you’re going to have problems with separations at the seams.”

One of the most common mistakes homeowners make when they install their own gutters is not allowing for enough “pitch,” the angle the gutter is pointed toward the downspout.

“You’ll want the gutter to drop about one inch every 40 feet,” Pantal says. “You need to use a chalk line and have a lot of patience.”

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Most homes in Southern California have aluminum or galvanized gutters that have been installed in sections or seamlessly. Both have a reputation for wearability, and sectional gutters can be installed by a handy homeowner with a few common tools. As with vinyl gutters, the weak points of sectional aluminum or galvanized gutters are the seams, which can leak or bend if installed incorrectly.

Seamless gutters are installed by professionals. “They bring a machine to the job site, measure out the lengths they need and run long pieces of aluminum or metal through the machine to create the gutters,” Cilani says. “Say they’re guttering a U-shaped area in front of a house that makes up a total of 60 feet. The only seams will be at the two corners and at the downspout. With a sectional gutter, you would have seams every 10 feet.”

Copper gutters are generally found on custom homes and are distinctive for the tarnished green patina they develop shortly after being exposed to the elements. “It lasts the longest and looks the nicest, but it’s also very expensive,” says Kristen Miller of Orange Coast Gutters in Costa Mesa.

The charge to install common aluminum, galvanized or vinyl gutters is about $2 to $4 per linear foot. Copper costs $12 to $15 per linear foot. “There are some people who love the look of copper, and they don’t mind paying the price,” Miller says.

For do-it-yourselfers, prices for 10-foot sections of vinyl, aluminum or galvanized gutters range from $2 to $5 apiece. Add to that the caulk, connectors, end caps and other accessories and the installation time.

Except for copper, most gutters are pre-painted, which is great for people who don’t want to pull out the ladder and the brushes, but it’s also limiting. Manufacturers paint their gutters with a selection of popular trim colors. If you’ve painted your house’s trim an uncommon shade, you’ll have to select a gutter that’s close in color or paint it to match.

Whatever the material, most homes have gutters with a five-inch opening across the top. “When the gutter is clean, that’s large enough to handle most of the rain we get in Southern California,” Cilani says.

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Many modern gutters also have a screen across the top, which prevents leaves and twigs from interfering with the flow. “A screen makes it a little more difficult to clean out the gutter manually, since you have to remove the screws that attach the screen,” Cilani says. “However, if you have some large trees near your house, they’re good to have.”

A downspout is necessary to channel water away from your house, but not all downspouts are created equal. One that simply ends a foot from the ground and doesn’t have an elbow to guide water away from your house can create pools around your foundation.

“You can get a downspout extension that takes the runoff farther away from your house,” Miller says. “There are also ‘winter downspouts’ that you can store in your garage and slip onto your gutter before the rainy season if you don’t like the look of a downspout on the side of your house.”

To protect the soil underneath the downspout, make sure you have a splash block, which is just a small slab of concrete or stone. “It’s one of those things people move when cutting the lawn and don’t put back,” Pantal says. “Then, when it rains, they have a muddy mess to clean up.”