Gutter Cleaningin Covington

Gutter cleaning, in our own words

Gutter Cleaning: We offer both Interior and Exterior Gutter Cleaning options

We offer both options of interior and exterior cleanings. We warranty the cleaning for 60 days after the cleaning at no extra charge.

Two different jobs on the same gutter

Interior gutter cleaning is the one most people mean. The trough gets emptied: needles, grit, roof granules, seed pods, the shingle sand that washes down over the years, and whatever a squirrel has been storing at the corner. Once that is out, water can actually travel the length of the run and reach the downspout, which is the whole point of a gutter.

Exterior gutter cleaning is about the face, the flat outside surface you see from the driveway. Gutters pick up a dark film there over time, and the drips that run over the front edge in a heavy rain leave vertical streaks behind. Washing the face does nothing for drainage, but it changes how the front of the house reads from the street more than most people expect. It also matters before a holiday light run goes up, because that gutter line is where the clips sit.

You can book one or both. Neither one makes the other unnecessary.

Fir needles are the real problem here

People picture gutter cleaning as scooping out maple leaves. In the South Sound, leaves are the easy part. Douglas fir, western red cedar and hemlock drop fine needles all year, and needles behave nothing like leaves.

A leaf is big enough to sit on top of a guard or float to the outlet. A needle is small enough to slip through almost anything, and once a few thousand of them mat together with grit and rain they form a dense, sodden plug that holds water instead of passing it. That mat sits in the bottom of the trough long after the last dry leaf blew away. We go into the difference in fir needles, not leaves, are what actually clog your gutters.

The practical result is that tree cover matters more than the season. A house with one large fir at the corner can fill twenty feet of gutter by itself while the rest of the run stays clear.

What a full gutter does to a house

A gutter that cannot drain does not simply stop working. It redirects water to the worst possible place.

The front edge of a gutter sits slightly lower than the back edge by design, so overflow is supposed to go out over the front. When the trough is packed, water backs up behind the debris and goes over the back edge instead, straight down between the gutter and the fascia board. That is the water that rots fascia, works into the soffit and finds its way behind the siding.

Below the house, the effect is just as unwelcome. Instead of leaving through a downspout and a run of pipe, roof water pours off in concentrated sheets at the base of the wall. In a wet winter that means saturated soil at the foundation, a damp crawl space and a garden bed that never dries out.

Downspouts are half the job

A clean trough with a blocked downspout still floods. Debris naturally migrates toward the outlet, then packs into the first elbow where the pipe turns. From the ground everything looks fine, because the clog is inside the pipe.

Checking and flushing the downspouts is part of the cleaning here. It is a short step that prevents the most common call back we could get: a gutter that was emptied last week and overflowed in the first real storm.

When to have it done

Two things drive the schedule: what is growing above the roof, and how much rain the run has to carry.

• Heavy conifer cover overhead usually means twice a year.
• A mixed yard with a few deciduous trees often lands on once or twice.
• An open lot with no tree cover can often go once a year.
• A gutter that already overflowed once will do it again. Do not wait for the next storm to confirm it.

If you want to see how this fits with the rest of the outside of the house, our season by season rhythm for South Sound homes puts gutters next to the other jobs so you are not making separate trips up a ladder in your head.

The warranty, and what it is for

We warranty the cleaning for 60 days at no extra charge. That window exists for a reason. Gutters here are not cleaned in a vacuum: a windy week can drop a fresh load of needles, and a heavy rain is the honest test of whether a downspout is genuinely clear. Sixty days covers the stretch where a problem would actually show itself.

Gutters and the roof are connected

If your roof has moss on it, that moss ends up in the gutter. Pieces break loose, wash down and settle in the trough, and a gutter cleaning on its own means cleaning the same gutters again after the next roof shed.

Our roof cleaning and moss removal service includes the gutter cleaning for exactly that reason, so the two are handled in the right order rather than paid for twice. If the roof is mostly clean and you want to keep it that way, a standalone moss treatment is the lighter option.

Gutter cleaning across the South Sound

We clean gutters for homes in Covington and throughout South King County, Pierce County and Thurston County, including Kent, Renton, Maple Valley, Auburn, Federal Way, Puyallup, Sammamish, Issaquah and Olympia. You can see the whole list on our service areas page. We work on houses, not commercial buildings.

Book a gutter cleaning online or contact us and tell us what is over your roofline. If you want the windows done on the same visit, say so and we will plan the day around both.