Keep Your Home Happy and Gutters Clean

Poorly performing gutters can lead to pooling water, foundation damage, ruined landscaping, wood rot, and a lot of unwanted damage to your property. The costs add up quickly, especially during the rainy season. In Northwest Arkansas a hard spring storm can put more water on a roof in an hour than a clogged gutter will carry in a day, and all of it has to go somewhere. The team at Top Hat Chimney & Roofing can clean, repair, or replace your gutters so you don't have to worry every time it rains.

What your gutters are actually protecting

A gutter has one job: collect the water that runs off the roof and carry it away from the house. That sounds simple, but it protects four things at once. The fascia board behind the gutter stays dry. The siding doesn't get splashed and stained. The soil beside your foundation doesn't turn into a standing puddle. And the beds and plantings along the wall don't get washed out. When a gutter is packed with leaves and sticks, the water has nowhere to go but over the edge, and it lands right where you least want it.

Pooling water against a foundation is the one we worry about most. Soil swells when it's saturated and shrinks as it dries, and that movement works on a foundation season after season. Water that sits against the wall also finds its way toward crawl spaces and low spots in the yard. None of this happens overnight, which is exactly why it gets ignored until the damage is already done. Wood rot works the same way. A fascia board that gets wet every time it rains will soften long before it looks bad from the ground.

What to expect with a cleaning

Our team will remove all the leaves, sticks, and miscellaneous debris from your gutters so they can properly drain the water from your roof. A thorough cleaning is more than scooping the trough, though. A gutter that's spotless but empties into a plugged downspout will still overflow, so the whole path matters. While we're up there, we look for the things you can't see from the driveway.

• Leaves, sticks and debris cleared from each run
• Downspouts checked to make sure water actually leaves the system
• Seams, corners and end caps looked over for leaks
• Hangers and fascia checked for sagging or pulled-away sections
• Slope watched, since a flat spot holds water and rusts a gutter from the inside

Cleaning is also the easiest inspection a gutter system ever gets. Once the debris is out, a hole, a rusted section or a loose run has nowhere to hide, and you can decide what needs repair before the next storm finds it for you.

Why the same spots keep clogging

Almost every house has trouble spots that seem to clog again a few weeks after you clean them. Usually it's a pattern, not bad luck. A tree overhangs one corner of the roof. A valley where two roof planes meet sends a lot of water, and the debris riding along with it, into one short stretch of gutter. An inside corner has no good path to a downspout. And trees don't only drop leaves in the fall. Blossoms and catkins come down in spring, seed pods and needles follow through the summer, and then the leaves arrive.

That's why we also install gutter guards, to put a stop to recurring clogged gutter issues. A guard won't make a gutter maintenance free, and anyone who tells you it will is selling something. What it does is keep the bulk of the debris out so water can still get in, which cuts down how often anyone needs to be on a ladder. If you have trouble spots that always clog and you're tired of spending your weekends up on a ladder, guards are the fix worth a look.

Cleaning, repair or replacement

Sometimes a cleaning is all a gutter needs. Other times the cleaning shows you what's really wrong. Leaking seams, holes and cracks, rusted sections, loose or detached runs, bad slope and damaged downspouts can all be repaired. When repairs stop making sense, replacement is the honest answer. Seamless gutters measured and fabricated to fit the house are the usual choice, because fewer joints means fewer places to leak.

We size a system from the roof pitch, the roof's square footage, how much water runs off it, and the landscaping around the house. A small porch roof and a big two-story hip roof are not the same job, and a gutter that's right for one will overflow on the other. Qualifying roof and gutter replacements from Top Hat are backed by our 10 Year Edge-to-Edge Leak-Proof Warranty.

Get it looked at before the next storm

If you have trouble spots that seem to always clog, give us a call or send a request through the contact form. We will evaluate your property, listen to your concerns, and provide a long-lasting solution, whether that turns out to be a cleaning, a repair or a set of guards. Top Hat has been keeping Springdale, Fayetteville, Rogers, Bentonville and River Valley homes warm and dry since 1983. You can reach us at (479) 751-0432.