Gutter Guard Seymour

Every tree needs to occasionally shed its leaves. There aren’t enough koalas left to naturally take care of the problem for us, so that’s the reason you need to constantly rake up piles of leaves and keep your gutters clean.

Raking isn’t generally too much of a bother – especially if you pay someone else to do it – but it’s a different scenario when it comes to cleaning out guttering. This task requires you to climb up a ladder, which can be unsafe no matter how careful you are. Once you’re up there, you’ve then got to scrub and scrape to get rid of all the dirt, while also holding your breath so you won’t inhale the noxious stench emanating from the leaf masses.

Now, leaf masses are a particular annoyance. As stated above, when they’re dry, they contribute to the fire risk. Actually, they can even slightly increase your fire risk even if they’re wet.

An interesting thing about wet leaf masses is they have the potential to spontaneously combust as they dry out. What happens is that microbes fermenting inside the mass generate heat. Once the moisture content of the leaf mass drops to around 25%, the conditions can be just right for the mass to burst into flames.

Another problem of wet leaf masses is they attract more leaves. Over time, the masses can grow very large, and that creates weight (the mass also can absorb many times its own weight in water). Eventually it’s possible for the mass to become so heavy it causes the guttering to pull away from the roof. This is costly to fix and obviously annoying.