Last night it rained hard all night and my gutters overflowed, as they always do if I haven't cleaned them recently. As I lay in bed cursing this, it suddenly dawned on me that it's my own damn fault.
Our property has lots of big trees, who like to drop lots of pine needles and leaves and those little soft brown seed pods during springtime (enough to fill three 55-gallon garbage cans, last time). The gutters essentially need CONSTANT cleaning.
Last time I installed new gutters -- extra wide, flat-bottomed, plastic, mounted-from-beneath gutters so you can pull a paddle through them from the ground -- I mounted them with a distinct slope toward each downspout. I wanted the water flow to be as fast as possible to make the gutters self-cleaning in a hard rain.
This was wrong thinking.
If I had mounted them level, as is standard practice, if one downspout gets clogged the water would simply flow to the next-lowest point, even if that downspout was clear around the other side of the house. They way they are now, that water is trapped between the high point and the clogged downspout.
Only took me twenty years to figure this out.
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