The importance of guttering: how it protects your home from water damage

Of all the jobs we are called out to, the most avoidable is damp caused by a gutter. A blocked gutter costs nothing to clear. The wall, the fascia and the plasterwork it ruins over three winters cost a great deal.

What a gutter is actually doing

A roof sheds an enormous volume of water. A modest house in a Cork downpour can send hundreds of litres off the roof in an hour, and every drop of it has to be caught at the eaves and taken to a drain. When that system fails, the water does not simply disappear — it runs down the wall, into the fascia, and eventually inside.

The four failures we see

• Blockages. Leaves, moss and grit build into a silt that holds water. Give it two seasons and you will find plants growing in it.
• Sagging runs. Brackets loosen or the fascia behind softens, the fall reverses, and water sits in the gutter instead of reaching the downpipe.
• Leaking joints. Seals harden and shrink. The drip looks minor until you see the stain it has left on the wall.
• Undersized or missing downpipes. A long run into one small pipe will overflow in heavy rain no matter how clean it is.

What it leads to

Overflowing water saturates the wall below. On a rendered wall you see green and black staining first; on a cavity wall, persistent saturation can bridge the cavity and bring damp inside. Behind the gutter, the fascia rots — and once the fascia is soft, the brackets have nothing to hold, so the gutter sags further and the cycle accelerates. Water running down to ground level erodes the pointing at the base of the wall and, in the worst cases, finds its way under the floor.

Keeping on top of it

• Clear the gutters once a year — twice if there are trees close by
• Look at them during heavy rain, which is the only time you will see where the water actually goes
• Check the wall under the gutter line for staining each spring
• After a storm, check the gutter for slate fragments and debris
• Fix a sagging run early, while it is still brackets and not fascia

It is the cheapest maintenance a house needs and it protects the most expensive parts of it. If you would rather not be up a ladder, we clear, realign, reseal and renew gutters across Cork City and County.