Never Clean Your Gutters AgainGutter Guard Installation in Baxter, IA

The three families of gutter guard

Nearly every product on the market is a variation on one of three ideas. Screens are a perforated or woven sheet laid over the opening, cheap and simple, sized to stop leaves and not much else. Micro-mesh is a fine woven cloth, usually stainless, held in a rigid frame, which filters rather than screens and stops material down to grit. Reverse curve is a solid hood that uses the way water clings to a surface to route flow around a nose and into a slot while debris carries on past. There are also inserts, foam wedges and brushes that sit inside the trough instead of covering it, which are a different approach again and generally a weaker one. Knowing which family a product belongs to tells you most of what you need. It predicts how it fails, what it costs, whether it can be retrofitted, and whether it will still be working in ten years. Brand names obscure this; the underlying mechanism does not.