The integrity of your home is protected by your roof, its drainage system, and the landscaping around your foundation, all working together to keep moisture from seeping into your home. Here are some recommendations to keep your gutters cleaned and your home protected and maintained against the damage of moisture and ice.

Clean Out Your Gutters

One of the most simple and often overlooked tasks that you can complete to your roof's barrier of protection is to keep the gutters maintained. Your gutters collect and divert a great deal of moisture from rain and snow runoff, which collect a good amount of debris as well. This debris can settle into your home rain gutters and clog them up, causing future rainfall to overflow your gutters and moisture to back up onto your roof.

Over time, this damages your shingles and allows water to fall upon the soil next to your home, causing problems. Not only does excessive water falling on the soil cause soil erosion and destroys your vegetation, but it also over-saturates the soil in this area and pushes moisture into your basement and foundation slab.

Once you understand the true responsibility of having clean gutters, you can keep them cleaned out regularly. Once or twice a year is a good recommendation, and more often if you have a great number of trees around your home that drop leaves, pine cones, needles, twigs, and seeds. You can contact a gutter cleaning service to help you clean them out if you cannot safely access your roof's edge. 

Check For Damage

It is easy to overlook your gutter's condition and age until they spring a leak and begin dumping rainwater collection onto your flower beds and water flows into a window well and causes interior moisture damage. A gutter professional will also be able to inspect your gutters for cracks, holes, and sagging damage and repair or replace them.

The ends of your gutters and their connection points are common places where leaks begin in your gutters. Your rain gutter downspouts should be adequate for the deluge of rainfall you get during heavy rainstorms. If your gutters need a wider downspout, your gutter professional can install this for you. Then, it is a good idea to make sure all the downspout ends have diverters to move the gutter's flow away from your foundation and a splash block to prevent soil erosion at this spot in your roof's drainage system.

If you need help with gutter cleaning, reach out to a local gutter company.