How Gutters Help Protect Your Home’s Foundation
Some people think that a roof gutter’s only purpose is to make a house look better. In reality, a roof gutter serves a much more important purpose other than being a decorative element for your home.
Roof gutters are there to direct rainwater off your roof, and away from your home’s foundation.
Rainwater’s Effect on Your Home’s Foundations
If rainwater from a heavy downpour isn’t channeled away, the water can become a powerful surge that pummels the ground right beside your home’s foundation. Rainwater doesn’t have to come in a heavy downpour—even gentle rain showers can damage your foundation if they happen frequently enough.
If a lot of water pools at the base of your home often, the soil around your foundation becomes saturated. The wet soil then exerts pressure on the foundation, causing it to buckle inward and eventually crack. After the soil dries, the pressure is lessened. When these differences in pressure happen enough times, your home’s foundations will shift, crack, and become uneven — or all three happen. Once the foundations are compromised, your home could become flooded by the next rainfall or literally fall through the ground.
Signs of Foundation Damage
Signs that your home’s foundations have been affected may not show until some time, depending on how much and how often rainwater pools around them. Some signs include mold growth in your home’s interior walls, flooding of the basement, warping, cracking or buckling of basement walls, and misalignment of doors, chimneys, or floors.
What You Should Do
Now that you know the importance of your roof gutters, make sure to have a complete system of them, and that they work. Your roof gutters should completely divert all the runoff from your roof away from your home and into a working drainage system. These are the measures you should take to ensure you have a first line of defense in protecting your home’s foundations:
1. Add Any Missing Gutters to Your Roofline
Install gutters all along your home’s roofline—make no exceptions and leave no gaps. Never forget that rainwater can not only seep into the ground and affect your home’s foundation, but it can also wash away your landscaping. And depending on the damage, this could cost a lot for repairs.
2. Maintain Your Gutters
Be sure to replace any bent or broken sections of your existing gutters. Any part of your gutter system that spills water on the ground will eventually cause the destruction of your home’s foundation. You must make sure that your gutters don’t get clogged with fallen leaves or other debris; clogged gutters are like having no gutters at all. Check your gutters regularly, and remove any dried leaves and debris that get into any of them. Clogged gutters can also attract pests. To prevent clogging, enhance your gutter system with a roof gutter leaf protection component.
Never take your gutters for granted; they’re your cost-effective first line of defense against foundation damage. Don’t put off repairing them or cleaning the accumulated debris off of them, or protect them from clogging with our special add-on system. Having and maintaining an effective roof gutter system is cheaper and less of a hassle than repairing your home’s foundation.
Protect your home with the best gutter protection systems from Bruce Andrews Seamless Gutters, LLC. As LeafLock-trained installers, we can seamlessly install new gutter protection systems over your full-sized gutters to prevent clogs. Let us help you avoid costly damage to your home, with our durable, worry-free, and maintenance-free LeafLock gutter leaf protection system. Call us today!
