Cleaning the gutters. It’s a dirty job… but somebody’s got to do it if you want to avoid serious water damage to your home.
Gutters capture rainwater as it streams off your roof and moves it away from your siding and foundation. But when gutters and downspouts get clogged with leaves and debris, water can’t flow through them. Instead, all that water can back up onto your roof, damaging the shingles, and overflow, leaking into your siding and flooding your basement.
Fortunately, cleaning gutters is a relatively easy DIY job you can do in an afternoon—especially if you stay on top of the job and clean them out regularly. All you’ll need is work gloves, a sturdy, extendable ladder, a gutter scoop or a trowel, a hose, and a dropcloth or bucket to collect debris. Before you get started, check out our step-by-step directions to cleaning your gutters.
Frost King has a full line of gutter accessories to help you take care of your gutters and downspouts. Here’s how to use them to protect your roof and foundation and keep water flowing away from your home.
Clean out any leaves, twigs or debris that’s trapped in gutters.
Gutter Scoop: Our Gutter Scoop is the tool you need for the job. Sized to fit almost any size gutter, it’s easy to use and has a built-in channel that lets water drain away as you scoop out the leaves.
Once gutters are clear of debris, cover them with one of Frost King’s screening products to keep them clean all season long.
Gutter Screen: Our snap-in Gutter Screens are an easy to install, permanent solution to clogged gutters—they snap into place and hold securely to keep out leaves and debris so the only thing that can make its way into your gutters is the rain.
Plastic Mesh Gutter Guard: Another option to keep gunk out of your gutters is our durable Plastic Mesh Gutter Guard. Just unroll it, cut the length and size you need, and bend the strips to fit into the top lip of the gutter. At the ends of the gutters, cut and bend the mesh guard to keep leaves from sneaking in on the sides. In this video [LINK TO Plastic Mesh Gutter Guards video, Beth Allen from DIY Hip Chicks shows how to cut the mesh to fit and install it:
Wedge Downspout Screen: Leaves don’t just get trapped in your gutters. They can collect in downspouts, too. To keep water flowing, Frost King recently introduced the Wedge Downspout Screen. Sized to fit most downspouts, it’s designed to let water easily flow into the downspout while stopping any debris. Watch this video to see how easy it is to install:
Keep water moving away from your home’s foundation to avoid a flooded basement.
Automatic Plastic Drain Away: After a heavy rain, check to see if water is pooling at the end of your downspouts. If it is, you need to move the water away from your foundation so it doesn’t make its way into your basement. Installing our ingenious Automatic Plastic Drain Away at the base of your downspouts is an easy way to extend them—the Drain Away automatically unrolls when water is flowing to move water away from your home’s foundation, and it rolls back up when the sun returns.
Tilt and Drain: Another way to easily extend your downspouts and move water away from your home’s foundation is our Tilt and Drain extension. It comes with an adaptor that’s easily installed at the base of the downspout. Once you’ve screwed on the adaptor, just attach the extension to start directing water away from your home. The extension even swivels 180° so you can control exactly where rainwater will go in your yard for the best drainage. When it’s not raining, you can flip it up so it’s out of the way.
Watch this video for step-by-step directions to use Frost King gutter products to keep your gutters and downspouts in great shape:
