Never Clean Your Gutters AgainGutter Guard Installation in Sully, IA

How much rain a guard has to pass

It is worth knowing the numbers, because guard capacity is usually discussed in vague terms. A heavy Iowa thunderstorm can drop rain at a rate of two to three inches per hour for short periods. Across a roof plane of a thousand square feet, an inch of rain in an hour is roughly six hundred gallons, so a genuine downpour is moving water off a house at a rate of tens of gallons per minute, all of it arriving at the gutter line. Every bit of that has to get through the guard surface before it can go anywhere. This is why open area matters, why a partially blinded mesh shows itself in a hard rain rather than a light one, and why the sensible test of a new installation is to watch it during a real storm rather than after a shower. It is also why a product that is marginal on capacity does not fail gradually. It works fine until the day it matters.