They say April showers bring May flowers, but it seemed for us that April showers just brought more May showers. Our old house was surrounded by tall trees and our gutters would constantly get clogged with leaves and forest gunk until we installed EasyOn Gutter Guard. We had such great success with the gutter guard that when we noticed the helicopter seeds from the many maple trees on our street causing problems at our new house, we already knew what to do!
Why gutter guards?
Clogged gutters are not just an invisible problem. When your gutters are clogged, they can’t do their job of redirecting water down the spouts and away from your home. The water that hits your clogged gutter and dumps out along your foundation can cause a whole host of problems included foundation damage, basement flooding, and more. We noticed some water getting into our basement since the spring rains began and knew it was time for some gutter guard!
Getting the best deal
This EasyOn Gutter Guard brand is exclusively sold at Costco. (I’ve seen some listed by third party sellers on Walmart and Amazon, but the prices are much higher!) The boxes we get in-store at our local Costco warehouse are the 5″ version which is a standard gutter size. One box contains eight 3 foot sections, covering a length of 24 feet. They are $59.99 per box at the time of writing this post but they do occasionally go on sale! They are also sold on the Costco website for the same price.
Supplies
- Enough gutter guard to cover the length of your gutters
- Ladder
- Roof safety equipment
- A person to spot you
- Gloves
- Safety glasses
- Center hole punch
- Impact driver or drill
- Metal/tin snips
Installation
The first step is safety! Installing gutter guards requires working from a ladder or from the roof. Follow all of the proper safety precautions for working from high up like wearing a tether and having someone keeping an eye on you from the ground! You’ll also want to wear tough gloves to protect your hands from the sharp metal edges of the gutter guard and, always, safety glasses!
Since we have installed this same gutter guard before, we had some ideas on how to expedite the process. First off, we marked the screw placement on the sections in three spots. Not super necessary but speeds up the accuracy. You tend to go a little cross eyed after looking at the same metal sheet over and over again. And, of course, you’ll also want to clean out your gutters before you seal them up.
The box contains detailed instructions on different ways you can install the guard, mostly differing based on the angle of your roof. Our roof pitch allowed for the “slide it under the shingles” method. This method can be a little finicky but it helps to get corner of the guard in first and the slide the rest under. Once it’s all the way under your shingles, you slide the guard down to overlap a little bit with the one next to it. The widest metal edge will rest on the edge of the gutter.
The box comes with self tapping metal screws but the self tapping process is kind of slow and, if you’re like me, the screws can slip around and fall off onto the ground and make you crabby. And you don’t want to be crabby on the roof. So Tyler had the idea to use a spring-loaded punch to start a tiny hole for the screws. It went way faster!
The box also comes with a bit for the screws, which is always nice! Attach the gutter guard with the included screws and it’s good to go! When you reach the end of a section of gutter, you will most likely need to trim a section to fit. We used tin snips because they seemed like the safest way to cut them from the roof.
Like I said before, we were really happy with the way these gutter guards worked at our old house. The mesh is fine enough to keep debris out but not too fine that it doesn’t let water drain into the gutters. We think it will be a great option for keeping helicopter seeds out next spring, too! But as always, we’ll report back here to update.
Check out our install!
Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful day!
If you’re looking for other outdoor projects for your summer check out these other posts!