Gutter Disasters: Preventing Water Damage This Winter

Jamie: 00:00:01

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Whether you're a homeowner, home buyer, real estate agent, or investor, we believe everyone deserves solutions to their homeownership challenges and inspiration along the way. Your path to success starts here. Welcome back to another episode of Thoughts from the Crawl Space.

Today we're going to talk about another way to help keep your home dry and safe this rainy season. This is Jamie Miller with Gold Key Inspection Services, a licensed home inspector. Been doing this for about 21 years.

So I've seen a few things and I'm always learning and happy to help you learn about your house and ways that you can help to maintain it.

So we talked in a previous episode about sump pump disaster, what that can mean to your house and how that can lead to flooded basements, water entry into the house, and so forth and so on. How to maintain it. Well, one of the points in that podcast, and if you haven't listened to it, I'd highly recommend you go back and listen to it.

But one of the points I made in that is let's take care of the water before the it hits the sump pump. How do we limit the amount of water? Now, you can't stop the water table from rising. You can't do, you can't affect where you live unless you move.

But what you can do is, is keep yard and roof runoff from accumulating around your house. And 95%. Listen to that again. I've heard many estimates that ranged 90 to 95% of water entry in a basement comes from roof and yard runoff.

So if we can affect that, if we can get that slope, the yard sloping away, if we can get water running away from the house on all, all sides, we are going to limit the amount of times that a sump pump needs to operate. Now, one way that we do that is through guttering and downspouts. And if you'd want to title today's episode, it could be the Great Gutter Disaster.

So one of the things you might see, especially this time of year, we're in the cold season here in the north and you, you've already seen the time this episode comes out. It might have warmed up, but late November, early December were extremely seasonally cold.

We had a lot of snow, we had thawing, we had melting, we had refreezing. That creates ice dams. You might have noticed your gutters with a buildup of ice. And then if it rains, where does that water go?

Well, there's nothing left to go into the gutter, so it shoots over the top of it and drops right by your foundation. And you know what happens from there. So gutters are an excellent invention. There's new and crazy kinds out there.

There's old ones that just flat out need replaced.

And so we're going to talk today just a little bit about how to look at your gutters, how to maintain them, how to know if they're working properly, how to and things like that. So why gutters fail? So probably the number one reason that gutters fail is simply they are clogged. Think about you breathing.

What's the one thing that keeps you from breathing? Your nose is clogged, right? Same with gutters. They need to have a free flow of water in the direction toward the downspout key point right there.

That allows water to come off the roof, down the gutter, down the downspout, through the diverter and out away from the house. So make sure you clean your gutters. We'll talk about some maintenance tips a little bit later.

But make sure you clean your gutters at least twice a year.

If you have a lot of trees around, really mature trees that drop leaves right in your roof and gutter system, you're going to have to do that probably more than twice. It's just going to be an ongoing process. If you don't like to do that, then hire somebody to do it.

But you would be almost better off not having gutters than to have them and let them get clogged up. Number two, they are blocked or disconnected.

Through the course of our 21 years of inspecting, we have seen a lot of things in gutters that can stop the flow of water. Pine needles, tennis balls, ping pong balls, dog toys, kids, clothes, you name it, we found it in a gutter. All right.

Most people never look in their gutters. And if you're shaky on a ladder or don't feel comfortable up there, we would highly recommend you call somebody to do that.

But have your gutters checked out regularly to make sure there's not anything up there blocking it. That's going to stop water from getting to the downspout. That's going to potentially cause it to back up, maybe even up under the shingles.

So any claw gutters, any downspouts that are blocked, what we'll frequently see is that tennis ball.

The water floats it along right till that opening at the downspout and then the water just piles up right there and overflows and dumps right Next to the foundation, improper pitch or slope would be number three. Now this seems rather obvious, but you would be amazed at the percentage homes that we inspect that have a poor slope on their gutter.

And you want to have the gutter sloping toward the downspout. And then typically the downspout is maybe about 8 to 12 inches in from the end of the gutter.

And so that last 8 to 12 inches is going to need slope, need to slope back toward the downspout just a little bit. So if you put gutters up yourself, I think you'll quickly realize it's, it's kind of a skill.

It's not something that just any homeowner can do and have it last for a long time and drain properly. So hiring a professional is a really good idea in this scenario and we'd recommend that you do that.

But you want to have a gutter and different jurisdictions will require different distances.

But depending on the slope of your roof, if you have a really steep roof and water is going to run off very quickly, especially with metal roofs, you're going to need wider gutters. You might need 5 inch gutters, definitely 4 inch gutters. The old 3 inch gutters worked for most roofs.

But if you have a steeper, fancy roof that water runs off extremely fast, or you have a very large surface area of a roof, you're going to need larger gutters, you're going to need larger downspouts, and the slope of the gutters are going to be crucial to properly get that water going where it needs to go. So three things.

Make sure your clutter, your gutters are not clogged, make sure the downspouts are not clogged, and make sure you have a proper pitch on your, the gutters. So general rule is if your house is about 40 foot long, you want to have a downspout on each end. Say you just have a simple rectangular house.

You don't want to just have one downspout on one end of that 40 foot. That's a lot of surface area for one downspout to handle. So roughly.

That's a good rule of thumb about a downspout for at least every 30ft of guttering. So we mentioned undersized gutters. Make sure they're the right size.

oh, maybe built in the early: 1900

And then they put metal over the top of that and the metal maybe even sticks out a little further than the shingles used to. So you don't see any of the old roofing. But now it. You have guttering that is set up for shingles, but not for metal roofing. And it's not sloped.

Right. The other thing we'll see is gutters that hang on the house at the same angle as the roof pitch, because the fascia board is that way.

So they just put it straight against the fascia. And now the water runs down the roof and just right over the top of the gutters. Doesn't even go in the gutters or not very much.

It'll drip if you have a slow rain, but in extreme situations it would not do that. So you need to have your gutters that are sloped properly. They need to have the right angle on them in relation to the roof.

They pretty much need to be flat. And you can see little wedges that can be created that put behind the gutters to make sure they're out at the right angle away from the fascia.

And then loose or sagging hangers. This is probably the number one defect we see on gutters is nails. They're.

They're big old long aluminum nails that go through the front of it, they go through the back of it, and then they go into the fascia board to hold it on and they just get loose. And one reason they get loose is the wood that they're going into is deteriorated.

If you have gutters that are not flashed properly with drip edge flashing and they're not installed right, if they don't drain right, water backs up, it seeps into the fascia board, it seeps into your. Potentially into your attic even. And then that wood is no longer sound and so it doesn't hold nails.

So if you see a lot of gutter nails backing out, there's a really good chance you have damaged fascia behind that gutter. And you have a bigger problem than, oh, I need to go pound that nail back in.

So that's going to take a little more investigation by someone familiar with that kind of thing for you to get fixed. So looser or sagging hangers are a big thing. You don't. Not all gutter systems have the same kind of hangers. The.

Probably the DIY ones we see the most, or where it just has a metal strap coming from the back of the Gutter and builders or contractors will just hammer it right through the shingles and opening up all. I'm almost speechless because I can't even imagine doing that. But it's out there. You can buy the straps, you can go do it.

Ideally, you would do it before you put the shingles on, but I've seen it done many times right through the shingles. And to be fair, the nails are over the soffit part. They're not over the house itself in most cases, but it's a.

It's an avenue for moisture entry through those nails. Don't want roof. You don't want any more holes in your roof than you. Than you need. So that's kind of a bad DIY mistake.

Another one we've seen that I don't love is plastic gutters. Basically a PVC material. They're lightweight, they're cheaper.

I've seen them on smaller houses when you can essentially say something is better than nothing. And to a degree, they might be right. But plastic tends to get brittle.

If you get ice buildup in them, they're going to crack, and then they're just worthless. So you're gonna have to get the good ones anyhow. One more thing on your gutters is the seams. This is a surprisingly important part of it.

We have a gutter at our own personal house that for years dripped at one of the end pieces. The cap on the end dripped. So they put all you. A proper gutter installation.

We'll have a professional put ends on them and then, you know, the right connection fittings at every elbow or downspout or corner or whatever. Well, this one was put on right. It's just sealant wears out over time. And the homeowner me, did not properly maintain this. And so we had dripping.

It dripped down into our front porch steps and it eroded the step. It even settled the concrete multiple times over many years.

I finally went up there and created a fix so that the water no longer dripped through there. It ran back towards downspout. But a drip, drip, drip. You've heard of Chinese water torture, you've heard of water boarding, that kind of thing.

It slowly. It creates a problem. So you want to make sure you don't have any drips or leaks out of any of the joints in your guttering.

That's a very common problem. It's just a maintenance issue, but it can really have a deteriorating effect on your foundation, on steps, on landscaping, on a variety of things.

So make sure you get that. Here's some hidden things you may not see with regard to your guttering system, foundation erosion and cracking.

One of the biggest things that we see is downspouts that discharge right near the foundation. A couple of things we see with this.

If you have a block wall foundation and you go inside and you're near the corner where most downspouts are, you might see a stair step crack pattern in the mortar joints. And this is because you have had settling over the years of water dumping in that corner.

Going down, settling the dirt, which settles the footer, which drops the wall, which allows the cracks. And so, simply put, you need to get the water going away from the foundation, not just dropping next to it. What's the point?

You might as well not have gutters if you're just going to have the water dumping by the foundation. All you're doing is concentrating it in one spot instead of spreading out. If you didn't have gutters, be spreading it out.

Now, I have seen some guttering systems lately, and this is not real common. It looks like they put something up and it is. It's more of a mister than anything. In other words, it doesn't channel the water anywhere.

It breaks up the droplets and creates a mist and essentially waters the landscaping below. And that sounds beautiful, right? But not that. Not necessarily the greatest in heavy rains.

The effectiveness over them long term has not really been documented. So you can look into that maybe in certain areas.

But as far as the regular get water away from the house kind of thing, I'd highly recommend proper gutters, downspouts and extenders. We recommend extenders at least six feet away. If the six foot is still inside your landscaping bed. Well, you need a longer one.

Then get it going away from the house. If you have a sloped hard surface right next to the house, it maybe only needs to be a foot or two and that'll carry the water away naturally.

So just get it away from the foundation so you don't have the erosion, the cracking, the basement, moisture problems.

Just having moisture sitting against the basement wall, even if you have a great waterproofing on the outside of it, just that water sitting there creates excessive humidity in the basement. And so the drier that that dirt can be, the better that's going to be for that humidity in that basement. So get that away.

Another hidden problem, I touched on it a little bit earlier, is the roof edge and fascia rot.

If you have guttering that is falling off, if you have nails that are pulling out, there's a very good chance you have some damaged wood behind that Might be only be localized. It might have been a weird area of the roof, or water just doesn't get away from it real well. But you're going to need.

In this case, you're going to need to pull the gutter off. You're going to have to take the fascia covering off, especially if it's metal and you can't see behind it.

And you're probably going to have to replace Fascia, maybe some 2x4 tail rafters, possibly even some roof decking. All that can go together if you're getting consistent backup. So some things to consider there with regard to your gutters, soil displacement.

What you'll find is when your downspouts don't just charge away or you got no gutters and you got a trough underneath the gutter line or the roof edge line because water's just been running there. Now you got soil displacement. It settled the soil right there. It settled it from between there and the house.

And so most likely you have a negative slope on most at least two sides of your house.

So you're going to want to get some regrading done in the proper way, not just throw rock on there to create a higher surface near the house, because water goes right through rock. You're going to have to create a nice base with clay, some kind of fabric for like a landscape barrier. And then you can put rock on top of that.

If you have the right slope, we recommend 1 inch of drop for the first for every foot for the first 6ft. So 6ft out, the dirt should be about 6 inches lower than it is up against the house.

And we know that's not always possible, depending on the grading of your home. But that is an ideal scenario. You don't want to ever raise dirt higher than the siding. In fact, you want it about 4 to 6 inches below the siding.

If it's dirt, you might want it even lower than that. Because if you have no gutters, you got wood siding, or you have poor guttering, you're going to get splashing. That splashing is going to jump up.

And especially on some of the particle board type wood siding, it really can deteriorate it pretty quickly. Ice dams, we touched again a little bit on this. But ice dams are caused when you have the inability for water to get off the roof.

And so the scenario is this. We have a big Snow. We got 6 inches of snow on the roof, and it's been cold and everything's okay.

And then the sun hits it and it melts and it runs down and let's say you have an overhang on your house, maybe a foot and a half or two foot wide, and that area is not heated. So a lot of the melting on your roof, some comes from the sun, but much of it comes from heat loss in the house.

Melts the snow under the on heats up the roof deckings, melts the snow. It runs down and gets to the eaves where it's not heated anymore. It's colder, gets in the gutter.

But we start getting an ice dam built up right there. You get the picture. And then we get more heat loss because we don't have good insulation in the attic and we don't have good ventilation.

And so more water runs down, and we got an ice dam right there. Where's the water going to go? It's going back up, and it's going to back up under the shingles. Shingles are not designed to seal out water.

They're designed to shed water. So if they can't do that, they're going to leak. And that's how we get ice dams. And you may have a house that has water staining around the perimeter.

It might only happen once every four years because it depends on the right combination of snow thawing, freezing, and that sort of thing so many times. You can help this scenario by one, adding insulation to your attic so you don't have as much heat loss.

Getting the attic air sealed so you don't have as much heat loss, and then improving ventilation. It's inevitable you're going to get some moisture in your attic. But we want to have good venting, so it dries it out.

So a little bit off, off the topic there, but that is a big part of ice dams. And, you know, ice dams, they're just a mess. And you'll know if you have that kind of setup, if you have big icicles.

If you see an area you drive by with big icicles, you know they have a big ice dam. And it's. It's likely creating major problems inside that house.

So lastly, real quickly, here's a couple of things to prevent your own gutter disaster. Clean gutters twice a year at minimum.

If you have bigger trees, maybe four times a year, especially fall and spring, inspect downspouts and make sure water is diverted at least 4 to 6ft away from the foundation. Check the gutter pitch. If you can't eyeball it from one end to the other, get out of level. Make sure you have some drop.

Make sure you don't have a dip right in the middle of it, which can happen if a nail comes out in a sags. Gutter guards now these can be good and they can be bad. Gutters are gutter guards. Excuse me. You have to get the right type for your trees.

If you have a lot of the little helicopter leaves that come from maple trees, you don't want any kind of gutter guard that is has holes in it any screening because they'll clog that up quicker than anything. And then you have a bigger mess that might take a gutter helmet type thing or something with smaller holes that they can't even get into.

So that kind of addition is helpful. Upgrade to 5 or 6 inch gutters where appropriate. Check for loose brackets or sagging and annual or seasonal professional inspection is required.

We can do this for you folks. You can call a gutter company to do it as well. But don't guess, don't hope that it's okay. Don't wait till it rains six inches to find out.

The method of getting water away from your house is insufficient. Do be proactive. Do what's needed to get it done right. Spend the money to protect your house's foundation.

Spending a few thousand dollars on guttering and downspouts and maintenance is a whole lot better than many thousands of dollars on a flooded basement, a cracked basement wall, foundation problems and things like that. So call Gold Key. Let us know what you have a question on. We'd be glad to just help consult whatever you need.

Refer you to contractor to get the job done right for you. Thanks for listening today. Keep your home dry and we'll talk to you next time. Thank you for listening.

This week you can catch up on the latest episode of the Thoughts from the Crawl Space podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. For more information about Gold Key Inspection services, go to goldkeyinspect.com.