How Gutter Cleaning Prevents Basement Flooding

You never want to experience basement flooding. Water in your basement may damage your home as well as ruin anything you have stored there and present a health risk to you and your family as mold and mildew start to grow.

Drying out your home and repairing water damage may be a long and costly process so, if possible, prevention is certainly better than cure. While it might seem contradictory to look to the roof when trying to solve a basement issue, issues with your gutters are likely to be responsible for damp or standing water in your basement. Learn how gutter cleaning from Discount Gutter Services can help to prevent basement blooding:

How Gutters Protect Your Home

Gutters aren’t just there to improve the appearance of your home or prevent roof damage or stress on shingles and sidings. Their function is simple, to lead water off the roof and safely away from the foundations of your home. This serves to protect your home at every level, from the roofline right down to the cellar.

Without gutters the rainfall is likely to collect right next to your home leading to soil erosion. Erosion can have a negative effect on any flower beds you might have situated close to your house as well as causing more serious problems.

Rain water pooling near the foundations is likely to result in standing water in your cellar and cause your foundations to settle causing cracks in walls and chimneys and subsidence.

Rainfall running down the side of your property may also lead to water damage to the walls of your building as well as the roofline.

Not all homes have gutters, they are just not needed in arid areas. But if you get heavy rainfall then the likelihood is you do have gutters on your home. The difficulty is that just having rain gutters may not be sufficient. In order for gutters to work effectively, they need to be regularly maintained. Otherwise, they can become clogged and not work as they should, causing equivalent issues, or worse, than if they hadn’t been installed in the first place.

The best thing you can do is be proactive rather than reactive. Don’t wait for a issue to arise before you deal with it but instead focus on proactively maintaining your home and prevent the issues from ever occurring.

Tips to Stop Basement Flooding

Clean your Gutters

Unblocking your gutters is a vital element of your home maintenance and not doing so is likely to have huge repercussions. Not only might your gutters become so clogged and heavy that they pull away from the side of your property or spilt, but overflowing gutters mean that rainfall is not being effectively funneled away from the foundations of your property which is likely to result in rain water in your cellar and damage to the foundations.

If water does gain access you also have to deal with the difficulties it causes there, including wood rot, mold and mildew which may be costly to remedy and can cause health issues.

Most property maintenance companies encourage gutter maintenance at least once a year if not twice and even more if you have a lot of trees overhanging the property. Autumn and spring are good times due to the fact that a lot of vegetation can collect in the fall and birds like to make their homes in gutters in the spring.

If gutter maintenance isn’t your ideal way to spend a weekend you can employ a professional in to come and maintain your rain gutters for you, or you may think about having gutter covers installed that prevent debris from building up to begin with.

Replace or Maintain your Gutters

Gutters don’t last forever and at some point you will have to fix leaks or even update your gutter system. If you are thinking about replacing your gutters you might want to look at seamless gutters as these are less likely to develop leaks. Installing gutter guards is also a possibility to reduce the amount of maintenance required.

While you are looking to see if replacements are needed you can also look for sloping or drooping problems. Drooping gutters could not be blocked but may still overflow with high rainfall as water is not being funneled away effectively. It is also important to check that downpipes are not blocked.

Check Where Water is Leaving the Downspout

In many cases downpipes will have extensions to protect your homes foundations from water. The issue is that these can often get in the way of lawn mowing or other maintenance and may be removed. This is fine when rainfall is low, but if they are not replaced in times of heavy rainfall this may lead to problems with rainfall collecting at the base of your home.

Other Tips to Stop Basement Flooding

While gutters are a great place to start when looking into the underlying reason behind damp in your basement, or taking measures to stop it, there are other potential culprits that you should also consider.

• If you have a damp problem have a look for cracks in your foundations and make any necessary repairs.
• Check your landscaping. It might not seem an obvious culprit, but if your landscaping causes water to flow towards your property this is likely to result in rainfall collecting and seeping into the basement or foundations of your home.
• Sump pump failures are a common cause of basement flooding. If you have a sump pump make sure it’s working as it should and ensure it’s turned on when you are expecting heavy rainfall.
• Check your flashing. Again this might seem like more of a roof issue but water always flows down, so if your flashing hasn’t been properly installed rain water may be falling down the exterior of your property and therefore ending up in your cellar.

If your basement has already flooded you need to mop up the damp and dry it out as quickly as possible so that you are able to assess the damage and hopefully uncover where water has gained access.