Gutter cleaning in Church Stretton

Silt, not leaves: what actually fills a gutter here

Most gutter cleaning talk is about leaves. Around Church Stretton, leaves are only half of it. The bigger problem comes off the roof itself.

Roofs in the valley sit damp for long stretches, shaded for part of the day and wet again before they have properly dried out, so moss takes hold along the bottom courses and in the joints between the tiles. Over winter that moss loses its grip. The next heavy shower off the hills carries it down the slope in pieces, and it lands in the gutter along with the grit it has scoured off the tile surface on the way down.

That is a genuinely different failure to a blocked town gutter. A leaf block sits at the outlet and the rest of the run stays hollow, so you often get away with it for a season. Moss and grit do not do that. They spread the full length and settle into a dense wet mat that packs down like soil in a trough. The gutter silts up rather than blocks up. Water does not pour out of one obvious corner, it seeps over the front lip the whole way along, which is why people are so often surprised at how full it is when they finally see inside.

Spa villas, wall hoppers and narrow cottage half-round

The second half of it is what all that is running into, and the houses here do not fail the same way as each other.

The big Victorian and Edwardian villas left from the spa era have long unbroken gutter runs, deep valleys where two pitches meet, and hoppers set high on the wall taking a downpipe from the roof above. A valley is a funnel: everything shed off both slopes arrives at one point. Hoppers catch moss on its way past and hold onto it, and because they sit high and out of eyeline nobody looks at them until the wall underneath has gone dark.

The older stone cottages have the opposite problem. Narrow half-round guttering holds very little to begin with, so it takes a fraction of the same debris to fill it, and when it goes over the edge it lands on soft old pointing rather than a modern cavity wall.

Then there are the porches, back extensions and conservatories tucked under a main roof. Each has a short run of its own catching everything the larger roof above sheds, and those short runs are the ones most often skipped. They are also, almost always, the ones sitting directly over a door or a window.

None of that is neglect on your part. It is the buildings and the ground they stand on.

Vacuumed out from the ground, with pictures both ways

A gutter that has silted along its whole length cannot be cleared from one end. Wet moss and grit pack down with the weight of soil, so the mat has to be lifted out the full way along rather than shoved towards an outlet and hoped for. That is what decides how the work gets done here. Everything comes up and off the property by suction, drawn out through a high-reach pole worked from ground level, so nothing is leaned against the house. On render, and on stonework with soft old pointing, that matters: ladder feet and ladder tops are exactly how render gets chipped and mortar gets scarred.

There is a camera on the end of the pole, so you see inside the gutter before I start and again once I have finished. If you are out when I call, I send the pictures over.

A standard clear covers:

• Moss, silt, grit and leaf mulch vacuumed out of the whole run, not just around the outlets
• Downpipe tops checked and cleared where they have silted over
• Hoppers and the short runs over porches, extensions and conservatory roofs
• Debris taken away rather than tipped in the border
• A look at brackets, joints and the back edge, with a straight answer if something wants repairing rather than cleaning

Clearing the gutter deals with what has already come down. If the roof is still carrying the moss that keeps feeding it, that is a separate job, done as a low-pressure soft wash and never a jet wash (why that matters).

What a hillside gutter clear costs

Gutter clearing starts at £55. That is a real starting figure for a standard house with guttering that can be reached the whole way round, not a headline number that quietly grows on the day.

What moves it from there is straightforward: the length of the run, the number of elevations once you count extensions, a wing or a conservatory, how far up the gutter line sits, how the access is around the back, and how heavily silted it has become. A run that has been left long enough to grow grass and seedlings takes longer to lift than loose leaf, so mention it when you ask and I can price it properly rather than guess.

Fascias and soffits cleaned start at £60. Doing them on the same visit saves paying for a second trip out, which is the only reason to pair them, and I will price both separately so you can see what you are paying for.

You get the price before any work begins. Use the instant quote tool on this site, or ring or text me on 07854 086820 and describe the property.

One hard frost on a packed gutter

Church Stretton gets proper frosts, and that is where a silted gutter stops being a cosmetic problem. A run packed with wet moss holds water rather than moving it, and when it freezes the whole length turns into a solid bar of ice. Ice expands. Joints that were watertight in October are pushed apart, plastic splits along the base, and brackets take a load they were never sized for, with the weight of saturated moss already on them before the freeze.

The damage rarely shows in January. It shows in the first proper downpour afterwards, when a joint that has been opened up drips steadily onto the same spot every time it rains. A fair number of gutter replacement quotes given out around here are not really replacement jobs at all, they are the bill for two or three winters of leaving it packed.

It is also why blasting a gutter out with a pressure lance is the wrong answer. That drives silt down into the downpipe and puts force through the same joints the frost has already worked on. Vacuuming takes the mess off the property instead of moving it somewhere worse.

Booking a clear before the frosts, and who you are calling

The sensible slot here is late autumn, once the leaves are genuinely down rather than halfway, and before the first hard frosts get into a full gutter. If your roof is shaded, north facing or under trees, a second visit in spring is worth it, purely to take out the moss that has washed down off the tiles over winter.

Holiday cottages and second homes are worth putting on a fixed date each year. An empty house cannot tell you it has an overflow running down the gable, and it usually gets found by the next guest. Because the work is done from the ground, nobody needs to be in and no keys need handing over. I cover the valley and the villages around it, including All Stretton, Little Stretton, Hope Bowdler, Cardington, Minton and Wistanstow, and if a neighbour wants theirs done on the same trip it keeps the travelling down for both of you.

TD Exterior Cleaning is Jack, working on his own across Shropshire since 2011, based in Shrewsbury, SY3 6AP, fully insured, domestic and commercial. The Google rating stands at 5.0 across 46 five-star reviews, and there are 169 recommendations on Facebook. Get a figure from the instant quote tool on this site, or call or text 07854 086820.