Gutter Cleaning in Woodthorpe

Gutter Cleaning for Woodthorpe homes

Hipped roofs put gutter on all four sides, so there are more corners, outlets and stop ends than a terrace of the same size has. What fills them is granular moss shed off the tiles rather than leaves, and it packs down hard.

The roofs here are hipped rather than gabled, which changes the shape of the job before anyone puts a pole up. A hip has gutter on all four sides, so instead of two straight runs there are four, joined by mitred corners, with stop ends and often two or three separate outlets. Corners and outlets are where the mat forms first, so a hipped roof has more failure points than a terrace of the same floor area. The eaves overhang deeply on this stock as well, which keeps the gutter further out from the wall than people expect and makes it invisible from any window in the house. You cannot check these by looking, which is what the camera on the pole head is for.

Woodthorpe sits in NG5, under Nottingham City Council and Gedling Borough Council. On the practical side: Almost every house has a drive, so the van comes off the road and the equipment travels a short distance. Woodthorpe Drive carries buses and is the wrong place to stop, so we load from the side roads. Gravel is worth mentioning when you book.

What we run into on Woodthorpe gutter cleaning jobs

What comes out of a gutter here is mostly moss rather than leaves. The rear pitch on a wide house faces away from the sun and grows a thick moss over the tiles, and every hard frost followed by rain sends a load of it into the gutter as loose granules. That material behaves differently from leaf litter: it does not float or blow away, it packs down into a dense wet mat that holds water like a sponge, and it silts the outlet from below rather than blocking it from above. A gutter can look reasonably clear from the ground and still be carrying an inch of that across its whole length.

How a Woodthorpe gutter cleaning job actually runs

Everything here is done from the ground, and the ground is the thing worth talking about before the day. At the front there is a hard surface to stand on and the pole reaches the eaves of a two storey elevation without difficulty. At the back it is lawn and border, and after a wet week a pole set down on soft ground with a vacuum head three storeys up is not something we are willing to do, so we work off boards or we move the day. Mature planting is the other obstacle. Shrubs and hedging grown up tight against the rear wall mean the pole has to come in at an angle rather than straight up, which slows the run and occasionally means asking you to tie a branch back for an hour. A lean to or garden room across the back has its own low gutter that is reachable easily but sits directly under the main run, so anything we bring out of the eaves lands on its roof and has to be cleared afterwards rather than left there. We bag what comes out and take it, rather than tipping it into a border.

Who books it here

Houses that are wide rather than tall, so floor area sets the hours instead of ceiling height. Almost every plot has mature planting on it, which means leaf litter, sticky sap and pollen arriving through the back door and settling on the glass for most of the year.

We run Woodthorpe on the same round as Sherwood, Daybrook and Mapperley.

What we check on every Woodthorpe job

The bottom of the downpipe is where a blockage actually shows itself. On this stock the pipe discharges into a shoe over a gully at the base of the wall, and the gully grating sits at ground level in a bed or under a path edge where nobody looks at it. Moss granules washed down from the roof pass through the gutter and the pipe perfectly well, then settle in the gully trap because the water slows down there, and over a couple of autumns they build a silt that fills it. The pipe then backs up from the bottom, the joint above the shoe weeps, and the wall behind it stays wet all winter. We lift the grating, clear the trap by hand, flush the run through from the top and watch it go away properly before we call the downpipe clear. Where a run drains into a hopper head partway down, that gets emptied on the same visit.

What the gutter cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• The camera: Worth having if you are a landlord, or simply not at the property that day
• Washing and extras: Downpipe unblocking, rodded and then flushed through to prove it
• Clearing: Moss, leaf litter, roofing grit, silt and nesting material lifted out rather than pushed along the run
• Clearing: Debris bagged and taken away, not tipped into the border

That is a sample rather than the whole list. The full gutter cleaning page sets out every section of the scope, what is deliberately excluded and why, how long it takes on each property size, and what tends to go wrong.