Gutter cleaning benefits more than your gutters, especially if you live on Mercer Island. This blog will explain why gutter cleaning is essential, how a professional service provider does it effectively and safely, and how it relates to your windows. 

Why Cleaning Your Gutters Is Important

Gutters protect the structural integrity of your home and prevent water intrusion by redirecting water away from your home. Mercer Island receives 37 inches of rain per year. If your gutters are not cleaned regularly, this water will overflow and saturate the soil around it. Saturated soil causes your foundation to sink and the home to become unlevel. The water weight from not cleaning the gutters will exacerbate this sinking. A newly built home whose owners don’t clean the gutters for 3-5 years may have 100lbs of water for every 10ft of gutter. Some indicators that your home is unlevel are:

• Windows and doors that are hard to open and close

• Pavement cracks

• A lopsided patio

• Gutters falling off

Fixing an unlevel home will require an expensive remodel or foam or jack solutions to level it. 

A less obvious impact of not cleaning your gutters is water seeping into the walls and causing dry rot, leading to a six-figure remodel. If you’ve put cleaning your gutters off, especially if you live on lush Mercer Island, you need to have them cleaned as soon as possible.

So, what goes into cleaning your gutters?

How To Clean Your Gutters Safely and Effectively

Many homeowners clean their own gutters. As go-getters ourselves, DAPrDAN understands the DIY approach. Still, it’s best to consider the risks of DIY before you clean your gutters yourself. 

How safely you can clean your gutters will depend on your confidence on a ladder, fitness level, motor skills, and age. As you age, your ability to safely move on a ladder decreases. This is especially important on Mercer Island, where many homes are built on uneven ground or stilts and are near the water. Not surprisingly, we recommend eliminating the risk of injury by hiring professionals to clean your gutters. Just as predictably, we recommend DAPrDAN:). 

As professionals, we have the tools to clean gutters safely. We use ladder leg levelers to prevent falls if we’re on uneven ground. Additionally, we harness ourselves to your roof to avoid injury. 

Safety is about technique and experience as well as tools. We are trained in safe ladder use and are familiar with the risks of gutter cleaning and the boundaries within which we can safely and effectively do it (e.g., how far out we can lean). After all, we do it regularly. 

When we clean your gutters, we don’t just do it safely. We also do it effectively. Using polls, scoops, buckets, blowers, and our technical expertise, we provide a level of clean most homeowners can’t achieve themselves.

How frequently you need your gutters cleaned will depend on rainfall, the types of trees on your property, and when they drop. Regardless, you need them cleaned regularly. When you work DAPrDAN, we perform a property assessment to determine your maintenance needs. Additionally, we keep a historical record of your property that includes the work we performed and our observations. Over time, this allows us to identify trends to inform how to maintain your property best. Of course, we practice complete discretion in all our partnerships. This is our company practice, but we also only hire individuals capable of honoring it. All DAPrDAN employees must pass an extensive background check before being hired and stepping foot on your property to safely and effectively clean your gutters as part of your maintenance plan. 

How Gutter Cleaning and Window Cleaning Work Together

Window cleaning should always be done after your gutters. You don’t want newly cleaned windows dirtied by the debris from your gutters. This isn’t an issue if you hire DAPrDAN. In addition to the obvious, we also watch for vulnerabilities to water intrusion through your windows. Water from overflowing gutters will enter the house if your windows are not appropriately caulked. One Thanksgiving, a homeowner contacted us to help with a cascade of water flowing into her home through one window. We discovered two large maple leaves blocking the downspout and that her window was not appropriately caulked. 

Whether you need roof and gutter cleaning, window and gutter cleaning, or just gutter cleaning, DAPrDAN is here for you. Contact us today.