A Few Things I’ve Learned About Gutter Guards After 40 Years
Working draft — Kevin, Arrow Gutters
Over the past 40 years, I’ve installed thousands of feet of gutter guards. I’ve also removed thousands of feet of all kinds of guards installed by other companies—including some that cost an unbelievable amount of money. After seeing what happens to them over the years, you develop a few opinions.
When I started in the mid-1980s, there wasn’t nearly the selection there is today. There was Gutter Helmet, wire mesh screens, and several plastic guards. I installed thousands of feet of those simple wire mesh screens.
Looking back, I think those old screens helped give gutter guards a bad name. They could be useful, but what they actually did and what people expected them to do weren’t always the same thing.
Once a year, in better weather
I installed those screens for a particular purpose: eliminate the fall cleanout and get the homeowner down to one cleaning a year, in decent weather. I didn’t present them as the end of gutter cleaning.
Around Columbus, we generally have two main gutter-cleaning seasons. There’s the fall leaf cleanup, and then the spring cleanup—usually late May or early June—after the maple seeds and other spring debris have come down.
For people with oak trees, fall cleaning could mean waiting until late December or even January for the last leaves to fall. Those wire screens did a good job of keeping the leaves out, which helped keep the gutters clear through the winter.
The idea was to clean everything up in June. After that, the screens would keep out leaves, stray debris, and much of what storms blew onto the roof until the following June.
That was the purpose I installed them for: one yearly cleanup when the weather was a whole lot nicer.
Spring was the messy part
Maple seeds would stick in the wire mesh like feathers. Oak trees dropped their spent flowers, called catkins, which could collect in clumps by the handful.
By June, the screens could look like a mess. They might still be letting water through, but they needed cleaning off, and the gutters underneath needed checking and cleaning out.
Then there were the ash seeds. Those little dart-shaped seeds were narrow enough to get through the openings. Some years they came down in great numbers, and their timing seemed erratic. I often had to remove the screens because so many seeds had collected underneath that I couldn’t simply flush them down to one end.
These days, ash seeds aren’t much of an issue on the houses I work on. Sadly, the emerald ash borer took out so many of those trees.
What did the numbers look like?
Back then, I installed wire screens for around $1.75 a foot—roughly $5.35 in today’s dollars. For a typical two-story house with 120 feet of gutter, that was about $210, or around $640 today.
A cleaning on that house generally cost $65 to $85—the equivalent of about $200 to $260 today. By saving one cleaning each year, the screens could pay for themselves in roughly three years.
The spring cleaning still needed to happen. The savings came from eliminating the fall visit.
Those present-day figures are simply the old prices adjusted for inflation to 2026.
The yearly visit had another purpose
Part of my selling point was that someone would look things over once a year.
I can’t tell you how many missing shingles I’ve spotted, signs of squirrels or raccoons moving into attics, or drainage problems that turned out to be roots blocking an underground line.
A gutter can look fine from the yard while the water has nowhere to go once it reaches the downspout. That annual visit was a chance to catch those problems too.
Where the idea went astray
Some springs, the debris was light. Occasionally there seemed to be hardly any. I remember years with a late frost when that seemed to be the case. The screens didn’t look bad, so people skipped the cleanup.
I didn’t really have a service contract. I left it up to homeowners to call when it was time.
Sometimes money was tight and people tried cleaning them themselves. Sometimes they simply forgot. And sometimes they moved, leaving the next owner with gutter guards and no explanation of the yearly maintenance they needed.
The screens stayed on the house, but the maintenance plan didn’t always stay with them.
I think that was part of the confusion over whether guards were worth having. Something installed to reduce cleaning gradually became something people expected to eliminate cleaning altogether.
I still install wire mesh
I still install a wire mesh guard today, though it’s much better quality than what we had back then. It has a black powder-coated finish and somewhat smaller openings, so maple seeds don’t tend to stick upright like feathers the way they did in the old screens.
In recent years, I’ve replaced guards of all types and price ranges with this simple mesh. On those houses, I’ve found it lets the water into the gutter and has helped resolve problems with winter icing, overflow, and drip lines that homeowners were having with their previous guards.
An expensive system isn’t automatically the best fit for a particular house.
Inside corners tell you a lot
One place I’ve seen many guards struggle is at an inside gutter corner, where a roof valley dumps water into the gutter.
That corner catches debris, and during a hard rain it also gets a tremendous amount of water coming down the valley. It’s a demanding spot for any gutter guard.
The larger openings in mesh can help tremendously there. With some installations, including SurFlo, I’ve used a small piece of mesh at that corner and the other guard along the rest of the gutter.
Sometimes a small change in the right place makes a big difference.
After 40 years, I don’t think there’s one guard that’s right for every house. The roof, the trees, the amount of water, and how somebody will maintain it all matter.
Before spending thousands, I’d want to know what debris the guard will handle, what maintenance it will still need, and how someone will get underneath it when cleaning or repairs are necessary.
Gutter guards can make sense. But “less cleaning” and “no maintenance” are two very different promises.
"Just to be clear: I’m not saying simple wire mesh is a perfect, magic bullet for every house. It has its own limitations. Over the years, the guard I’ve actually ended up installing the most is a solid, middle-of-the-road system—something right between basic screens and those sky-high, overpriced brands. In Part Two, we are going to look at the downsides of mesh and break down exactly when those incredibly expensive, high-end systems actually make sense, when they don’t, and where that sweet spot in the middle is."
