Mr Marker

It's been a quite spring. With over two thousand Waterloov^® installations locally, we've only had two service calls. I feel like the Maytag Repair man. I wonder if this is really a dream or if our customers have lost our phone number.

But then a week ago, a lady whom we installed in 1999 called to inform us that she was having water overflow from her gutters covered with Waterloov^®. It was the first time we heard from her in all that time. When customers call with this issue, we've learned to ask a couple basic questions: The first question being--"Have you had a new roof installed recently?"

Sure enough she had a new roof installed just a couple years ago which is a big red flag. The biggest threat to the Waterloov system working is a bad roofer.

Here is a list of some of things careless or just plain bad roofers have done to Waterloov^®.

1.      Remove the product and reinstall it incorrectly. They reinstall the panels with the lip of the panel on top of the gutter lip causing over shoot.

2.      Get shingle scraps, roof grit and other construction debris inside the gutters.

3.      They beat them up and dent the panels and then nail them into the roof making it impossible to remove them and install them correctly.

4.      They step on the panels and flatten them or drag the shingle bundles of them and scrape off the paint.

5.      They don't overlap the panels and leave space between the panels or they overlap them too much and don't have enough to cover all the gutters.

( I remember one roofer who did #5. He ended up being about six feet short and rather than contact us, he took a piece of metal and bent it to match the contour of the Waterloov panel and where there are supposed to be louvers in the front vertical surface, he used a black permanent magic marker to draw louvers. He installed this fake cover on an upper gutter where customer could not see the difference between real louvers and fake louvers. Of course the rain water overshot the gutters and the homeowner called us to fix it.)

Fortunately for this customer, the roofing contractor was a fairly good one and did not make any of the above mistakes he just didn’t clean the gutter adequately before reinstalling the Waterloov panels.

Her problem turned out to involve a direct pipe. Above her garage, she had an upper long gutter with a leader dropping down and into the top of a Waterloov panel on the first level above her garage. We call that a "direct pipe."  And right there at that point the water was coming over the gutter.

There was no debris collecting on the louvers and looking at it from the ground, we could see no reason for the overflow. To investigate we removed the Waterloov gutter guard right at the point the leader dumped into it and what we saw inside was a build up--a dam--of heavy shingle grit that had washed down from the upper gutter and deposited inside the gutter at the outlet tube which was slightly raised creating a dam.

While grit that normally washes through the louvers is easily flushed through the system, this was just too much grit. Not to worry though, with a few hand scoops the grit was removed and the panel reinstalled to finish the service call. The good news is that the service call was a minor charge as opposed to what might have happened if the roofer had committed some of the thing I listed above.

With a new fifty year roof installed, I doubt that we'll ever hear from this homeowner again unless a falling tree limb does some damage.  

 

          Waterloov Gutter Protection