Well-maintained rain gutters are essential for sustaining a home’s integrity.
They protect your home from rotting, leaking, and pest infestations, among other threats, by collecting and guiding rainwater away from your home.
The problem with poorly-maintained gutters is that they can get clogged with leaves and other debris, causing water to accumulate and possibly penetrate and damage your home’s foundation. This is where gutter guards come into play.
Gutter guards are designed to keep debris from infiltrating your home’s gutters, while also allowing rainwater to filter through.
There are several different types of gutter guards and it’s important to figure out which one best fits your home’s needs.
This will depend on various factors including the area you live in, the types of trees and animals that share the neighborhood with you, and the weather in your part of the world.
Micro Mesh Gutter Guards
Micro mesh gutter guards look like metal or uPVC plates that fit over the top of your gutters.
But a close inspection shows that those plates are perforated by thousands of tiny holes that are as small as 50 microns in diameter.
That’s about 1/500th of an inch, or 1/20th of a millimeter.
That’s certainly fine enough to keep out leaves and twigs and most seeds, though tiny particulates may still get in.
However, those larger materials may come to rest on top of the guards and need to be swept off from time to time.
This type of guard is particularly appropriate for houses that are near evergreen trees.
Pine needles can fall through coarser screening media or get stuck in foams and brushes, but usually do not penetrate micro mesh covers.
Foam Gutter Guards
While other types of gutter guards sit on top of the gutter opening, foam gutter guards sit inside them.
They are flexible lengths of coarse polyether foam that allow water to pour through easily but catch leaves, seeds, and dirt.
These guards are among the least expensive and the easiest to install.
All that’s needed is a pair of scissors to cut the foam to the proper lengths.
Fitting them into the eavestroughs is just a matter of pushing or bending them into place.
However, some customers who live in areas where there is a lot of sand, dirt, and dust blowing around complain that those materials get caught inside the foam pieces, mix with water, congeal, and then become difficult to clean out.
Brush Gutter Guards
Imagine taking a very long, fat bottle brush and laying it inside your gutters—you’ll have a good mental picture of what brush guards look like.
Like foam guards, brush guards are relatively inexpensive and easy to install and remove for cleaning.
Indeed, some people report that the brush bristles themselves catch leaves and require frequent cleaning, lest the accumulated debris impede the flow of water into the gutter.
Screen Gutter Guards
Screen guards consist of coarse screens that fit over the top of the gutters.
They may resemble hardware cloth or chicken wire and are typically made of metal, nylon filaments, or coarse polyether foam.
They’re lightweight, inexpensive, and not overly difficult to install, but they often don’t last as long as other guards.
Since the screening material tends to be fairly coarse, small leaves, seeds, dirt, and pine needles can easily make their way through the guard and into the eavestrough.
High winds or falling branches can bend or dislodge them entirely.
Reverse Curve Surface Tension Gutter Guards
If you’ve ever seen a trickle of water clinging to the outside of a pipe or running along a ceiling or wall, you’ve seen a demonstration of the principle of surface tension that keeps water adhering to a surface until a greater force—such as gravity—pulls it away.
Reverse curve surface tension gutter guards use this principle to conduct water into the eavestroughs.
They completely cover the top of the eavestrough and then curve back toward the house, creating a long horizontal slot that leads back into the gutter.
Water flows over the top of the guard, around the curve, and into the slot.
This system completely prevents leaves and other debris from dropping into the gutter from above.
However, it doesn’t create a maintenance-free gutter system.
Debris can be washed into the gutters with the water, and since these are the heaviest, bulkiest gutter guards available, they are more difficult to remove when gutter cleaning becomes necessary.
Weighing the Pros and Cons
Whether you have a guard of some type or you leave your gutters open to the elements, you will still have to clean them out from time to time.
Even the best gutter guards do not block 100% of the dust, dirt, sediment, insects, debris, leaves, seeds, twigs, and animals that eavestroughs seem to attract.
If a salesperson tells you that with their product you’ll never have to clean your gutters again, run away.
There’s no such thing.
What gutter guards are good at is cutting down on the amount of crud that gets into your eavestroughs, which means that you have to clean them less often.
And when you do have to clean them, the job is generally less messy and arduous.
The first question to ask is whether you need gutter guards at all.
If your house has no trees anywhere near it, isn’t located in an especially dusty or sandy region, and isn’t part of an environment where there are a lot of nesting birds, gutter guards may not be a wise investment.
On the other hand, if you do have some or all of these things, you may be very thankful for a product that makes it unnecessary for you to climb up a ladder and clean your eavestroughs two, three, four, or even five times a year.
If you live in an area where there are a lot of pine trees, you might find that a more solid gutter guard, such as a micro mesh or a reverse curve, will be a smarter purchase.
It’s easy for pine needles to become lodged in or fall through the other types of guards.
On the other hand, if you have a lot of deciduous trees around your house that shed big leaves every year, a brush, screen, or foam guard will keep most of them out.
If you want a gutter guard system that’s practically invisible from ground level, consider a brush or foam system that fits completely inside the gutter.
And if you’re especially concerned about how your roof and eaves look, you probably shouldn’t consider a reverse curve guard, since they tend to be bulky and obvious.
Once you’ve narrowed down the type that’s best for you, you’re ready to take a look at our top recommendations for gutter guards so you can compare price estimates and choose the one that’s right for you.