Never Clean Your Gutters AgainGutter Guard Installation in Polk City, IA

Where the water goes when the gutter fails

A roof collects a remarkable amount of water. A modest house sheds hundreds of gallons in a single ordinary storm, and the entire job of the gutter system is to move that volume away from where the house meets the ground. When a gutter overflows it does the opposite: it concentrates the runoff into a curtain that lands in a narrow strip right against the foundation, repeatedly, in the same place. Saturated soil against a basement wall is how water finds its way through, and it is a common cause of a wet basement that people spend a lot of money chasing from the inside. The pattern to look for is a damp spot indoors that appears after heavy rain and correlates with a particular corner outside. Before sealing a wall or installing an interior drain, it is worth checking whether the gutter above it is overflowing, because that is a much cheaper thing to fix and it is upstream of everything else.