Choosing Gutter Guards

<!--[if gte mso 9]> LESLIE: Bev in West Virginia needs some help with a gutter situation [1]. What’s going on?

BEV: Hi. I have a 1904 bungalow and my gutters, every fall, get filled with leaves [2] and they’re too high for our ladder to climb up, so we have to have someone to come and do that for us.

TOM: OK.

BEV: What I was wondering is, is there some sort of a gutter guard [3] or some kind of screening or something that would be good to use in a situation like this.

TOM: Bev, there are a bunch of options out there. You could start with gutter screens and they’ll do a pretty good job of keeping out the majority of the leaves and debris but eventually the leaves will sort of rot and they need to be – the screens pulled out and then the gutters cleaned anyway. There are also a bunch of gutter guards out there. Some work better than others but, basically, the way they work is they allow the leaves to wash over the gutters and onto the ground but the water, through the force of surface tension, actually goes into the gutter. I put some of those on my dad’s house and they worked pretty good for quite a long period of time. I think that’s probably the best option and I’d probably go with a gutter guard over a gutter screen.

BEV: OK. Alright, well thank you so much.

TOM: You’re welcome, Bev. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.