Printer friendly version

Call us now at 919-630-0527

We are also the only company to offer free digital photos of the before and after so you can see for yourself that the work was done right. Just ask us in advance and give us your email address. Also, we are the only company to offer free removal within 4 years of the install date if you are not happy with the performance of this product. No one else will remove their gutter guards at no charge.

Can these gutter guards pay for themselves in cost savings?

If you live in an area with good-sized trees, you may need your gutters cleaned out 2 or 3 - or even more - times per year to keep up with the leaves, needles, acorns etc. that fall.

The cost of gutter cleaning depends on many factors such as the size of your home and so forth, but let’s say that it ranges on average from $85 to $95 each time for a 2-story home of around 2,500 square feet with gutters on the front and along the back.

So, if it costs $85 per cleaning, and you get 3 cleanings per year, then the cost for that year is $255. Although we’d obviously have to measure the length of your gutters to be give an accurate Estimate, our gutter guards for a home of this size might cost around $650. If you’re paying $255 per year, then these guards pay for themselves in exactly 2 and a half years This is a rapid pay back period.  

What have you bought recently that paid for itself in just 2 and a half years? Energy-saving appliances? Water-saving appliances? How about a washer? Dryer? Stove? Gas furnace? Hot water heater? None of these pays for itself in about 2 years, even with rising natural gas prices.

Let’s say that yours is a somewhat larger home, and you pay $95 each time, but you only need 2 cleanings per year or $190 total. Let’s say that our guards cost $750 for a home of your size. That means that in less than 4 years (46 months exactly), the guards pay for themselves. Again, the pay back is fast compared to most other things you buy for your home. Here’s a way to make it even faster: refer a new customer to us, and we’ll give you $25. We’ll also give the new customer $25 off of their purchase, too. No limits on the number of referrals you can make – get $25 for each one.

Competitors claims

The first thing you’ll hear from the boys with the big ads in the Yellow Pages is “you’ll never have to clean your gutters again.” This is their big selling point – and it is also what justifies the extravagant price you have to pay for that product. Let me ask you this. If someone were to say to you, “Put this oil in your car, and you’ll never have to change your oil again,” would you believe that? Probably not.

Or if someone says, “Buy these 4 tires, and you’ll never have to buy new tires again,” would you believe that? Probably not. So it is with the claim of “never” having to clean a gutter again – it’s just not believable. Remember, “never” is a long, long time. It’s simply wishful thinking to think that gutters never have to be cleaned again. Sure, we’d all like to have such a product, but unfortunately it doesn’t exist. So if there is no such product, then realistically, you need to look for a good product at a good product – like mine.

You might ask, “If no product on the market keeps the gutter clean forever, why buy the product at all?” Well, why would you change the oil in the car every 3,000 miles - if you only have to change it again in 3,000 miles? The answer is that it’s good for your engine. In the case of gutter guards, they are good for your home. Your gutters fill less often, spill over less often, back up less often, clog less often – and the chance that rain water damages your home is far less as well. In addition, my guards can pay for themselves in cost savings to you, and if you change your mind after purchasing, we’ll remove them free of charge.

Competitors’s solid aluminum or rigid covers made of plastic don’t offer as much protection as they claim

Not too long ago, we were called to a lady’s house which has solid aluminum gutter covers over every inch of the guttering system. This solid aluminum system was the very same one I had on my house a long, long time ago, before I removed it because it did not work. Solid aluminum looks like nothing could penetrate, but don’t be fooled. A certain percentage of leaves, when wet, become very bendable, like spaghetti noodles. So they will simply slide right around the curved upper lip of these guards that is supposed to push them outward to fall into your yard, but instead they glide right around the metal curve and drop into the gutter itself.

After spending over an hour cleaning out just the front of the house, I rang the door bell and spoke to the owner. She had been washing her windows from the inside and doing other chores, so she had seen us work non-stop for an entire hour just on the front, heaving out pound after pound after pound of sopping wet, heavy leaves onto the tarp below. I asked her how long the gutter cleaners she had called prior to us had taken to clean out her gutters. “Oh, about 45 minutes tops for the whole house,” was her reply. “And did they also pull out a huge, heavy pile of wet leaves like we have here,” I asked, gesturing toward the tarp “No,” she said, “their tarps had maybe 5 pounds of pine needles in them at the most.” “Guess why they took only 45 minutes for the whole house, and we’ve taken an hour just to properly do the front section?,” I asked.

A smart person, it then dawned on her that these other gutter cleaners had merely tidied up the tops of the gutter covers, leaving all of the wet leaves still inside the gutter, collected their fee, and drove off on their merry way. She generously offered to pay us by the hour to take however long it would take to completely clean out the gutters the right way on the rear of her home. She had gutters on the first floor in the rear and also on the second floor as well. To unscrew each and every one of the aluminum fasteners and then screw them back on properly, and clean out the gutters came to almost 4 hours time for this 2,800 square foot home. (No gutter cleaner I have ever seen is willing to spend 4 hours cleaning out just 1 gutter system!!! Gutter cleaners make money by ‘cleaning’ as many gutters in a day as they can, so they have a monetary incentive to ‘finish’ each job just as fast as possible and move on go as quickly as they can to the next one.)

Aluminum ‘knuckle busters’ often can’t be cleaned out

Another problem with aluminum is that it comes with catches or fasteners that they are hardest to open and close in the entire industry. In fact, you have to twist these aluminum clips so hard to open and to close them that they sometimes break in half. (You ask:” Can you buy replacement fastening clips anywhere?” No, which is yet another draw back to this type of system. Over time, if enough clips are broken or lost, the aluminum sheets will be blown out of position by the wind and become ineffective or they can be blown entirely off of the roof.) So what does a gutter cleaner in a hurry do? He doesn’t bother to twist these knuckle busters off and then on again because it just takes much too much time and effort. Instead, he just picks up a few leaves sticking up through the slit opening in the metal cover so that the area looks clean, and then he moves on. When this little scheme goes on for several years, the resulting moisture build up next to the edge of the roof can cause the unlucky home owner some serious problems. High moisture levels for long periods of time can rot the edges of the plywood roofing, and gutters that are brim full of leaves will cascade rain water over the front lip, shortening the live of your fascia and possibly soffits and siding as well.

The drawbacks of aluminum guards also apply to many hard cover vinyl ones as well

“Heavy-duty” and/or hard, molded vinyl has a major drawback similar to the aluminum kind – both are very hard to open and very hard to close. Many of the very expensive vinyl gutter covers are intended to be so permanent that they are constructed and installed in such a way that they cannot be opened at all, short of pulling and prying so hard on them that the product actually cracks or breaks. This type of solid cover, rigid system is problematic as a result, just as the aluminum version is.

Further, heavy-duty, hard molded vinyl comes with openings that are so small that you usually cannot see whether there are leaves in the gutter that need to be cleaned out. (The aluminum version is usually fastened down so flush and tight against the gutter that it too is virtually impossible to see into.) Not ever being able to see whether the gutters need cleaning (or any other kind of attention) is a serious downside to these types of gutter guard systems. The Amerimax Defender gutter guards that so many people ask us to install are made of flexible, not rigid, material with an edge that is easy to lift up if a repair to the gutter is ever needed or if it needs to be cleaned out.

It bears repeating once again that when gutter cleaners are in a hurry (and most of them are because the more gutters they clean in a day, the more money they make), they simply skip over hard to open gutter guards fasteners and don’t clean out that section of the gutter. Instead, to make the gutter look clean from below, they just pull out whatever leaves or twigs may be sticking up above the lip of the gutter. Once things look OK from a cosmetic standpoint, they declare the gutter to be clean, collect their money and head to the next job as quickly as possible. Long story short: you are much, much better off with gutter guards, like ours, that are easy to open and easy to close because it’s far more likely that even unscrupulous cleaners will actually muck them out if the job is easy to do.

Any gutter guards that you buy must be easy to open – or else

The gutter guards you want to install need to be easy to open up, so you can see inside to check for any problem that could occur. Here a inside secret gleaned from my years of experience with gutters: gutter cleaners do not like to spend a lot of time and effort trying to clean out gutters which have hard to open gutter guards on them. So guess what they do? They just pretend to open the gutter guards up, and instead they clean up little bits of leaf debris on the lip of the gutter, etc., etc., so that, from the ground, the gutter looks clean (even though it really isn’t). Just in case the gutters need attention at some point, we have made our easy to open and close.