No guttering is infallible. Heavy storms, age, and weathering can all take their toll eventually. But there’s a difference between severe damage to guttering and mild damage. Ironically, it’s often the latter that can lead to more serious – and expensive – problems.

Major damage requires fixing ASAP

Imagine a major storm hits your area overnight. Upon going outside in the morning, you can see you’ve lost a couple of roof tiles. You also notice a section of guttering has been knocked down, perhaps by a falling branch. No matter how it happened, you can see the guttering needs to be replaced as quickly as possible.

Minor damage is easy to leave

Now imagine your guttering has performed well over the years, and it looks fine. Except for that slight leak around the joint bracket where two sections of guttering meet. It’s not a major problem, so you leave it.

But this is the type of issue that can be a major problem without you realising it. The guttering still takes water away from your roof, but the leak around that bracket is enough to send some of the water down the outer wall of your home.

And this is the kind of thing that is easy to overlook or miss. It probably won’t do any damage if it only happens once or twice, but it is the accumulative effect of the water running down the wall that will lead to damage in the end.

The cost of leaving a blocked or broken gutter

We should point out that guttering doesn’t even need to be faulty to cause this problem. If it becomes blocked with debris, the same effect will occur. Water will begin to overspill the gutter, leading to the same result we mentioned above.

Either way, if you leave it long enough, damage will occur to the fabric of your home. Imagine water running over a rock. It won’t do any damage at all if it only happens once or twice. But over hundreds or thousands of years, that rock will wear down under the constant flow of water.

Of course, it won’t take anywhere near that long for faulty or blocked gutters to cause damage to your home. That’s why regular checks are vital to ensure your gutters are doing what they should. It’s easy to feel you can just leave the guttering and deal with it later, especially if you have more pressing things to do. However, as we’ve seen here, leave it too long and you’ll have a more expensive repair to deal with – a repair that involves coping with water damage to your home as well.

Cleaning your gutters once or twice a year, depending on how clogged they get, helps you to keep an eye on things. If you spot some leaks (easy to test with a watering can), it’s time to solve them before they get a chance to inflict damage you could do without.