Ask the Engineer More about How Gutter Guards Work

In the last posts I covered screens, membranes, filters and the hooded fin type of gutter cover.

In search of the perfect gutter guard inventors needed to improve upon the fin type of gutter guard since it allowed too much debris into the gutter in mild-to-heavy debris conditions. What they did was add a trough along with a sieve in the bottom of the trough. They added it to portion of the gutter guard that extended downward into the gutter to limit the size of the debris that is allowed into the gutter. Basically it's a trough with openings to allow water into the gutter.

It seems like a step into the right direction. The inventors dilemma was what size to make the openings in the trough. If the openings were too small then all of the debris that would normally enter the gutter from the fin leaf guard accumulates in the trough and clogs. If the openings are too large than the debris can enter the gutter and clog. Each manufacture of this type of cover arrived at their own determination of what the optimum size of the openings should be. In reality there is no optimum size because what works for one type of debris (large leaves) doesn't necessarily work for another (pine needles) type of debris.

After it deteriorates in the trough a sufficient amount of debris still gets into the gutter to clog the gutter.

What makes the fin and trough type of gutter guard work is the use of surface adhesion just as with its predecessor (the fin) and gravity. The inventors reverted back to the screen type which operates only by gravity in the trough in their attempts to advance the the technology in a significant way but failed to doing so.

Again, maintenance involving the use of a ladder is required to remove the gutter guards and clean the downspouts and reinstall the gutter covers. Maybe a slight improvement over basic fin type gutter guard, but not a solution to ladder free maintenance.