How often should you clean your gutters?

What actually decides the interval

Gutters don't fill on a schedule. They fill according to what's above them, so four things move the number more than the calendar does.

• Trees within falling distance. Not just leaves. Maple seeds, pine needles, blossom and catkins all pack down into a mat that holds water, and pine needles in particular sift straight through most guards.
• What the roof does with debris. A shallow roof lets leaves sit and rot in place; a steep one washes them straight into the gutter in the first heavy rain. Neither is better, they just fail differently.
• Guards, screens or covers. These change the job rather than removing it. Fine material still gets underneath, and the guard has to come off to reach it, which is usually why a guarded gutter goes years without being looked at and then fails all at once.
• Your weather. Long dry spells followed by short violent storms hand you a full gutter and a downpour on the same afternoon.

The signs it's already overdue

You don't have to guess, and you don't have to go up to find out. Most of the tells are visible from the ground, in the rain, from a window.

What a blocked gutter costs

The gutter itself is the cheap part. What it protects isn't.

Water that can't reach the downspout goes over the edge, lands at the base of the wall, and soaks the ground your foundation sits on. Do that for a few seasons and you get damp basements and moving footings. Water backing up under the roof edge rots the fascia and the sheathing behind it, where nobody looks. In a cold climate the same blockage becomes an ice dam: meltwater runs down the roof, meets the frozen mass sitting in the gutter, backs up under the shingles and finds its way inside.

None of that is dramatic on the day it happens. It's slow, and it's expensive by the time it's obvious. That's the sort of thing a schedule catches and good intentions don't.

When to hand it over

Gutter cleaning is work at height. That's the real risk in the job, and it's worth being unsentimental about.

A gutter service is the better answer if any of this is true: the house is more than one story; the roof is steep, or the ground you'd be standing on is soft, sloped or uneven; you'd be reaching sideways rather than moving along; there are power lines anywhere near the roofline; or you simply aren't confident. A cleaning visit costs a fraction of what a fall does, and a crew will usually mention the loose bracket or the split seam while they're up there.

One thing worth checking while you're thinking about it: where the downspouts actually put the water. A clear gutter that empties straight onto the soil against the wall has just moved the problem down a story. Extensions or a splash block that carry it several feet clear of the foundation cost very little and do most of the work the gutter was installed for.

Past a certain point it isn't cleaning at all. A downspout that stays blocked after the gutter is clear, gutters pulling away from the fascia, or visible rot in the boards behind them are repair jobs, and worth the opinion of somebody who does that repair.

Getting two visits a year onto a calendar

The reason gutters get missed isn't that anybody thinks they don't matter. It's that "twice a year" has no edges. Late spring and late fall arrive without announcing themselves, and the job only feels urgent during the rain, when you least want to be outside doing it.

Six months from the last time you did it, not six months from a date on a calendar somebody else wrote. That's the interval Patina uses, and gutters are one of the jobs it offers during setup, because nearly every house has them.