Gutter Cleaning

The gutter is where a house wash fails first. When a gutter overflows, concentrated debris runs down the face of the siding below the joints, and that is what produces the dark vertical stripes people call dirty siding. It is not dirty siding. It is a gutter problem showing up one storey lower, and washing the siding without clearing the gutter means paying for the same wall twice.

We clear gutters by hand into a bucket rather than blowing them out, because a blower throws wet leaf pack onto the roof and the siding you are trying to keep clean. Downspouts get flushed until water runs free at the bottom, and if one is packed we take the elbow apart rather than guessing. The debris leaves with us.

Two things fill gutters at the shore and they are not the same job. Inland, under the tree cover in Brick and Toms River, it is leaf pack and pine needles, and it packs hard at the elbows. On the barrier island it is roof grit and shingle granules, which settle into a dense sludge that water will not lift, and a gutter full of granules is also telling you something about the age of the roof.

If you have been searching for a rain gutter cleaning service, that is the same job under a different name, and it is the one most people put off longest. Most shore homes need it in late spring once the pollen and seed drop is over, and again in late fall once the leaves are down. That cadence is the single highest-leverage maintenance step a homeowner can buy, because it prevents the overflow streaking that otherwise triggers an early re-wash.