GutterBrush

5/31/18

This article talks about my experience with GutterBrush. This is a product that goes in your gutters. The idea being that it fills the space so that leaves and etc. do not get into the gutters, or as much. It is also probably less invasive than other methods of covering your gutters, in that you don't need to do anything like drill, nail, or put things under your roof shingles, possibly mess up your roof, or pay someone to install them. And the others cost a lot. You just place these into your gutters and occasionally take them out and clean them.

I've been using GutterBrush for many years now. I first got their trial GutterBrush, which is a six foot piece that you can play with (and keep). You just pay shipping. GutterBrush is basically a large pipe cleaner. I was pleased with the logic of the concept and quality of the product and decided to buy it for all the gutters. Some background is that we have five oak trees and two maple trees, so we get a lot of leaves.

Here is what the gutters tend to look like when leaves are falling:

Notice that the leaves will simply bounce off, or rest on top, and water can still get through and flow through the gutters. This is especially important to me, since I have a rain barrel system attached to a downspout, so I want as few leaves and gunk in the water as possible. The GutterBrush acts as a pre-screen before the water touches my other screens before going into the rain barrel. I also want to use the leaves as much as possible and not have them turn to gunk, by adding them to my compost pile.

To clean the gutters now, I can just reach up with my hands, or use a hose or broom, to take the "impaled" leaves and trapped sticks off. Probably every other year, I take out the GutterBrushes and shake and hose off the gunk, and flush out the gutters entirely. This process is much easier and less messy than my yearly cleaning routine before. Avoiding mess 100%, however, is probably not possible no matter what system you use...nature is just messy.

And here is what the gutters look like when they are cleaned out:

People might be wondering, "what about pollen?", so here is what the gutters look like when pollen is falling. Note, I pulled it up a little so you could see the pollen inside, and not just on the top of, the GutterBrush.

In this case, what will happen is some of the grains will fall through due to wind and especially rain, and grains being small, and they will most likely be flushed out of the gutters. For the clumps of pollen that remain impaled, just clean out as you normally would.

One "con", is that sometimes you can see the bristles sticking out of the gutter. To me, this is not a big deal at all. I think a solution for this would be if they just decreased the height of these bristles a little. Maybe one could solve this by buying the next size down?

Another, is that when you do eventually take them out to clean them, be careful not to hit them too hard against something to shake out the debris. Doing this can bend them. You can, however, easily bend them back into shape.

Thank you for reading, and check out GutterBrush. I think you'll be impressed that the solution to making gutter maintenance more bearable is so very simple.