Gutters are made to divert water from the top of your house to the bottom. Why is this important? Water is a weathering agent, believe it or not, and it will ruin the materials that make up your roof over time.
How do you think the Grand Canyon or valleys are made. Water. It does not happen over night but if large pools of water were allowed to settle on the top of your roof all the substances that your roof is made from would erode over time. Give it some times and you would have leaks all over the place.
As it stands roofs, even with gutters, erode but instead of it happening every 20-30 years it would happen every 5-10 years depending on where you live and how much rain you receive. We live in Vancouver WA and our roofs, which cost tens of thousands to replace, would need to be replaced every couple years without gutters.
Gutters can be made from steel, copper, aluminum, or vinyl. There are other materials gutters Vancouver WA can be made from but these would be the four main ones.
The materials I just mentioned are molded into hollow pipes (with an opening at the top) and vertically installed around the edge of your roof. When it rains all the water runs into these pipes.
There is another long horizontal pipe, called the downspout, that connects to the pipe running around your house. All the water converges here and heads south to a pre-determined dump site (usually by the edge of your garage or to the side of the house).
The whole premise of a gutter system is to direct water from your roof to the ground in a controlled way. You do not want endless streams of water going all over the place. When you have heavy rain this is unavoidable but gutters still control the flow of water to a certain extent even in downpours.
Here is the problem with gutters. Like everything else on your house a gutter will require maintenance and will eventually need to be replaced no matter how well it was installed. As with anything the more expensive materials will last longer and clog less easily.
You need to make sure that you maintain your gutters, get them routinely cleaned out, I know that after about 20 years they will need to be replaced. These systems break, rust, and wear out over time.
If you need gutters Vancouver WA please called a certified contractor with a valid license, insurance, experience, and come with some good recommendations.
Gutter Pro is a good company to start out with. They offer a 20 year warranty on any work they do and have been selling and installing gutters Vancouver WA for a long time.
You can ask them for a quote and they would be glad to come out and give you an estimate and share with you the different materials and systems you can have installed on your home.
