Gutter Clearing in Shrewsbury, Vacuumed from the Ground

What actually fills Shrewsbury gutters, and where

Gutters here fill up because of what is growing over them. A lot of the older streets in town are lined with mature limes, and a lime is close to the worst tree you can have hanging over a roof. It drops sticky honeydew through the summer, then papery bracts and seed cases, then a heavy leaf fall late in the year. None of it is the clean dry leaf people picture. It mats down into a wet felt that sits in the run and holds water instead of moving it, and a single big lime can keep a gutter topped up on its own.

Then there is the guttering itself, which is really two different jobs depending on which part of town you are in. Around Belle Vue, Town Walls and Copthorne there is still a lot of original cast iron on the period property. Cast iron is deep and heavy, so it will carry a blockage for years without saying anything, and when it does fail it fails slowly. The joints are bolted and bedded, and debris sitting against them keeps them permanently wet until they start to weep down the wall. From the pavement you often cannot see a thing wrong.

Out on the estates at Sutton Farm, Radbrook, Bicton and Bayston Hill it is modern uPVC, which goes wrong the opposite way round. It is shallower, the outlets are small, and it hangs off clips that only take so much load. uPVC tells you it is blocked fairly quickly, usually by spilling at a joint in the first proper downpour, but it also gives up sooner once the weight is in it. Monkmoor, Meole Brace and Shelton sit between the two, plenty of red brick semis with big established trees behind them and guttering nobody has looked inside since it went up.

The £55 starting point, and what lifts it

Most people want a number before they ring, so here it is plainly.

• Gutter clearing from £55
• Fascias and soffits from £60

What moves it above the starting figure is straightforward: the size and shape of the roofline, how many elevations there are, the height, how easy the property is to get around, and how bad the gutters actually are. A short terraced frontage in town is a different job from a detached house with four separate runs and a conservatory to work over. Something that has gone past leaves and silt into solid rooted growth takes longer than something that has just gone unloved for a year.

Whatever it comes to, you get the price confirmed before I start, not after I have finished. If I turn up, look up and think it is more than I first said, I tell you there and then and you are free to say no.

The fascias and soffits are the white boards below the gutter, and they go green in the same shaded, tree-covered spots for the same reasons the gutter fills. They are a separate job at a separate price, from £60, but doing them while I am already set up saves me making a second trip and saves you arranging a second visit.

How I clear them, and how you see inside

What comes out of a Shrewsbury gutter is very rarely the dry leaf people picture. Most of the time it is black wet silt, lime bracts pressed down into a mat, moss that has rooted into the seam, and grit washed off the roof, and the whole lot weighs far more than it looks like it should. All of it goes up the pole rather than over the edge. The vacuum runs from the van on carbon poles with a suction head at the gutter line, so everything it lifts drops straight into a drum instead of onto your patio, your borders or your car, which matters more than people expect once they have seen the state of a neglected run.

There is a camera on the pole feeding a screen at ground level. I can see the inside of the gutter while I am working, so I can tell the difference between a gutter that is clear and a gutter that only looks clear from below, and you get the before and after of your own guttering rather than a promise. It is also how I spot the things you would never see: a bedded joint starting to weep, a bracket that has rusted through, an outlet that has been quietly choked for years.

The other part of it is that no ladders go against your house. On the older Shrewsbury properties that is not a small point. A ladder top resting on the front edge of a run of cast iron, or on a bargeboard that has been soft for a while, puts load on exactly the part that is most likely to let go, and ladder feet on soft ground next to a period frontage do the rest. Working from the ground takes that away entirely, and it means the awkward stuff, over a conservatory, a porch or a side return, is reachable without anyone standing on anything.

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What a blocked gutter actually does to a house

A blocked gutter never announces itself. It just overflows down the same strip of wall every time it rains properly, and by the time anyone notices, most of the damage has already happened.

The sequence is fairly predictable. First the wall stays wet in one place instead of drying between showers. On red brick you get a dark tide mark, then green growth on the same strip, then, six months or a year later, a cold damp patch appearing on the inside of the room behind it. On rendered walls the render stains first, then holds water behind the surface until it blows off in a patch. Anywhere there is painted timber, and Shrewsbury has plenty, constant wetting is the quickest route to a rotted bargeboard or a soft window head.

Then there is the weight. Wet moss and silt are far heavier than people imagine, and a full run is carrying that load all day. uPVC clips are not built for it, so sections sag, joints part, and water starts leaving the gutter at the low point as well as over the front edge. A clear from £55 turns into a repair bill.

The one that gets forgotten is the ground. This is the part I would push hardest, because it is invisible and it is the most expensive thing on the list. A gutter is doing one job above all others: taking the water off an entire roof plane and putting it into a downpipe and away. Blocked, it takes that same volume and pours it into one spot at the base of the wall, over and over, all winter. The ground there never dries out. You get splashback dirtying the brickwork, pointing washing out at low level, a border turning to mud, and a permanently saturated strip of soil sitting against the footings of the house. Older Shropshire property tends to have shallow footings, solid walls and no cavity to stop damp crossing, so a wall that is being fed water at the bottom stays wet from the bottom, and it shows up inside as a patch that never quite goes. Repeatedly soaking and drying the ground right against a house is not something you want going on for years, whatever the wall is built of.

Clearing the gutter is the cheap end of that story. Everything that follows it is not.

Booking, and prices for the rest of the outside

Two ways to get a price. Use the instant quote tool on this site, which takes about a minute, or ring or text me on 07854 086820 and describe the property. The size of the property, how many elevations there are, how easy it is to get round the back, and what sort of state the gutters are in is usually enough for me to price it on the phone.

If the roof is the reason the gutter keeps filling, that is a low-pressure soft wash and never a jet wash, and the roof cleaning page sets out why. Everything else I do, with prices:

• Window cleaning, from £18
• Roof soft wash, from £250
• Driveways and patios, £3.50 per m², plus £1.50 per m² to re-sand block paving
• Solar panels, £6 a panel
• Conservatory roofs, from £60