Frequently Asked Questions about the History and Comparisons of Gutters Page #1 of 3

“ for the finest in rain management.”

Here are links to specific topics for residential rain-gutters
as researched and written by: David Rich since 1992 to now

Page #1

12. Steel vs. Aluminum?
13. Plastic Gutters?
14. Sturdy Installation
15. Snow Damage
16. Level or Graded Gutters?
17. Drip Edge Roof Flashing
18. Is it Continuous?
19. Corners for Gutters
20. Colors to Choose From?
21. Downspouts & Elbows
22. Leaf-Catchers?

What changed the trend to have gutters as a standard on houses?

Gutters are still a rare thing to see on houses in most of the country. It is only here and places near the coast that gutters are a required building code. In much of the country, building codes still do not require gutters in housing construction, since there is not as much heavy rainfall as we have here near the Coast.  As close as Eastern Oregon this is the case, where they only get a few inches of rain a year.  So if you look around in those areas, you will see that most homes do not have gutters.  Some houses may even have a short 10 foot gutter just over the doorway that the home owner bought at a hardware store.  They often would not bother to mount a downspout, or put on any endcaps.  The water simply runs out on either side to splatters to the ground.

Many of the older homes built in the before the 1940’s here in the Portland Metro area were built without the benefit of gutters, since there were no building codes requiring them yet. Besides, they did not have any good cost efficient solutions for rain management at the time.  The early gutter concepts like copper sheet metal and cored out cedar gutters were very expensive, so only the fancier houses had them. Sealing the seams, ends, corners, and outlets were a trial, so few houses had gutters.  Also, Concrete foundations were still a relatively new concept, so the damage from excessive ground erosion was pretty much unknown by most people. It is something that does not normally occur over the course of a couple years, but over a few decades. But when this damage does occur, it is such a costly and invasive repair that the house is rendered nearly worthless.

Not having rain water drip off the roof and onto your head as you leave the house is a nice advantage of having gutters on your house, but it is not the reason that our building code enforcement in this area requires gutters on all houses and garages. It is not even because of flooding basements. as stated above, it is the result of seeing thousands of houses with cracked and damaged foundations, due to ground erosion and the many tons of pressure of the house down on the foundation. Even sinking just a few inches is devastating to a houses value and livability, and can make it very dangerous to live in. Electrical fires and broken pipes from this sort of settling. The evidence it quite clear.

As you can see here, when the foundation is compromised, the plumbing, sewer, and electricity needs to be disconnected. The house then needs to be separated from it's foundation and jacked up off of the foundation, in order to break out the old concrete, to set up the forms, to pour a whole new foundation. Then to set the house back down onto the new foundation, once it has cured for a month. Then to reconnect all the wiring and plumbing needed. This can take up to a year to do in some cases, and cost from $30k to $150k to do this on an average size house.

Keep in mind that without a rain sewer system to carefully carry the rain water away from the foundation and into a dry well or out to the city streets, gutters are not only pointless, but will do more harm than good. Picture in your mind; having no gutters on your house and letting the rain dribble evenly across the roof edge. That is better than dumping huge amounts of collected water in one spot on the ground near the foundation.

This is another house here in Milwaukie Oregon that required some major foundation replacement. They have spent a great deal of effort to publish 4 web pages with about 50 photos on each page detailing the recreation of their basement. Click on the photo above to see what they had to endure to fix their problems and how long it took.

The City of Portland has been asking home owners to disconnect their downspouts from their underground rain sewer pipes and have this water dump on the ground. This is in conflict with the building codes, and will result in the damage to thousands of houses here in the city. If you are one of these home owners and you have a working rain sewer system, I implore you to reconnect as soon as possible! They may have made it seem like a requirement to disconnect, but it is strictly voluntary.

If your rain sewer system is not functioning correctly, you should have it fixed. It is very important! We have seen many older houses around the area that have gutters installed, but there was never any rain sewer system installed? the downspouts just bleed gallons of rain water out onto the ground just inches away from the foundation. This is a tragedy just waiting to happen, if it is not already too late.

Again, the primary reason for gutters to manage the rain water from the roof of a house is to prevent ground erosion that causes foundation problems.  If you have a basement, that is even more of an issue, and you may have suffered some flooding of your basement.

It was not until the governments (not so long ago) established building codes and it's enforcement to uphold these codes, that we had it as a standard in housing construction in this area.  Due to our heavy rains in this area over the years, many foundations had fallen to ruin.  As well as a weaker foundation with no steel re-bar reinforcement, crumbling apart from a poor cement and river bed sandstone mixed with muddy river water.

Back in the early 1900s some of the larger houses in the area were built with an elaborate eave with a soffit, fascia, and wood molding on the outer edge.  They had to custom form a steel or copper gutter in sheet metal to fit in the wood channel.  Some problems with this was having separations every 10 feet that had to be soldered together.  They would have to use solder, since they did not have the good silicone composite caulks like we have today.  They would have to solder them together after they were up there on the house using an open flame torch, which was dangerous right there against the wood of the structure.  They probably burned down a few houses doing this, like the huge fire they had in the West Hills recently from plumbers soldering water pipes together.

The expansion and contraction due to temperature changes are different than the wood structure, so the seams would be ripped apart and leak.  This expansion and contraction would also cause them to buckle and pull loose.  Even if the seams were not pulled open, the sheet metal would fatigue over time and develop cracks if it was a long run of gutter.  When this happened, the leaks would cause a great deal of dry-rot in the wood work under it, causing a great deal of damage, so it is not done much any more these days.  The concept of continuous external gutters was developed, so any clogged and over flowing gutters or leaks would not cause such expensive damage to the structure.

We had removed 3 layers of custom steel gutters on this house below house.  Each layer was placed over the rusty gutter below it, and that top layer had rusted through as well.  This house was only about 50 years old. We scrapped the built-in gutter system and mounted a gutter on the outside of the stucco walls, since the old gutter was leaking inside the walls and causing a great deal of damage inside the house.

We were called back a couple years later to replace the roofing. We did a t layer tear-off, new plywood covering the old gutters properly, and new 40 year roofing shingles. These photos were taken about 10 years later.

Again in the 50s and 60s they built a lot of cheap flat roof homes with a tall fascia board that was higher than the edge of the roof.  Then they simply nailed in a roll of flashing sheet metal to the top edge of that fascia board, and pressed it into the end of the roof, making a shallow gutter, and just slopping hot tar over the roof.  This gutter concept was also a horrible idea, and many of these houses needed to have the fascia board cut down to be flush with the roof end, and an external gutter mounted on it.

Here is an example of one house we worked on back in 1994 and again to complete the job over 10 years later.  Click on the photo below to see more details of that work.

After it became a matter of building code in this area to have gutters on houses to save them from ground erosion, to try and make it cost effective they were using steel sheet metal for gutters, instead of copper, since aluminum was still not a reality yet.  But these steel gutters were not lasting very long.  Later they developed a galvanizing for steel to make it last longer.  They were able to make them last 10 to 20 years, depending how clean they were kept.

They did not have complex sheet metal roll forming machines to generate continuous gutters like we have today.  Sheet metal craftsmen would have to carefully bend 10 foot strips of metal into the wood molding shape for the outer face of the gutters, to replace the old wood moldings.  Some cheaper gutters would only have a plain flat face to them, being the first fascia gutters, just not as tall.

Again, they would have to use solder, since they did not have the good caulks like we do today.  Still, the inherent danger of the open flame was a problem, but there was no other solution.  They had to make gutters that could be mounted outside the wood structure so when it leaked, it was much less destructive.

They first made a small gutter with a very narrow bottom, to mimic the old wood roof edge molding.  It was later abandoned due to it’s lack of function, since it filled with debris too quickly, and was too hard to get your hand in it to clean them out.  This larger gutter worked OK, but was still expensive since it was so labor intensive, and did not last long.

Why were the K-5 gutters developed?

Back when homes were built with some style, even if they had no gutters.  They had fascia boards, soffits, and some wood molding along the roof edges.  This molding is the only reason for the shape of the K-5 style gutter.  They used long nails with thin rolled sheet metal tubes called ferrules, to support the gutter and resist ladder pressure.

To mount these gutters right, the installer is to remove the old and often rotten wood molding.  The gutter then replaces that wood molding.  This in keeping with the style of the house, as though it was meant to be like that from the beginning.

This house to the right had some quarter round gutters on it that were rusty.  The client thought to keep it historical he needed to find a contractor who could make the same sort of gutter. That gutter profile was no longer available, and we explained to him that looking at the details of his house, it shows that a wood molding gutter would be much more proper anyway, since he had that same shaped wood molding there on the rake-edge of the roof (as seen in the photo).

It is sad to say, but due to the cost and hard work it takes to do it the right way, it is very rare to see it done right.  They developed a short cut by installing gutters with straps that wrapped around the gutter, and were then nailed on top of the roofing, which goes against all concepts of proper roofing; to hide all the fasteners from the weather.  We have more details about this problem in the next section here, and a few web pages detailing what we do to properly mount gutters on houses that were originally designed not to have gutters.

This is one of the most common misnomers in gutter work still today I work to dispel. The thought that this is a more classic look is false. Most older classic houses were originally built without gutters or built-in gutters that were concealed from the ground view with wood molding work. The main problem with the built-in gutter design was that when it clogged and over flowed, or later when the sheet metal rusted through and the seams every 10' began to leaked it caused serious dry-rot, so they realized an externally mounted gutter system was best. Houses without the benefit of gutters would have an OG type of wood molding at the roof's edge to finish it off that was just like the shape of the K-5 gutter I install.  Often this wood molding is worn and rotten from all the years of rain dripping off it.  I've gone out of our way to build out the roof edge to form a structure to mount our flat back gutter to attach the hidden hangers to with wood screws (see our Fascia Fabrication web page for examples). The older houses like this did not have the half round gutter originally. They waere added much later, so thinking this is bringing it back to it's original look is simply not true. You need to think of what the original architect would have designed if he had access to what we have today. The half round gutter machine was just a very simplistic roll forming machine. They went to a lot of trouble to develop a reliable K-5 gutter machine.

There are very few half round gutter machines still in operation in the USA for good reason. There are no local machines here, so the only parts that can be acquired is 20' long sticks that were shipped in from afar that are very expensive, so a continuous gutter in this profile is no longer an option. The half round gutter shape was just one of the first continuous gutter roll-forming machines developed, before they had developed the more complex roll forming machines we have now with more malleable pre-painted alloys that would not crack and scratch the paint when bent at a full 90 degree angle.

As far as the look I feel it is best if a rain-gutter system is not quite so apparent on your house looking just like the external plumbing that it is.  This first generation continuous gutters are like seeing a monster with an ecto-skeleton. Worse over is the fragile nature of this gutter and downspout profile that dents much more easily and will visibly show those dents more than any other style compelling you to replace the gutters long before they have failed. Besides it's atrocious look there are several functionality reasons they had obsolete this shape over half a century back:

The half round gutter did not work very well, since it is about half as deep as the K-5 gutter I install, so the slightest leveling problem or debris in the gutter would cause it to over flow.  Because they have no flat back to them, the supports for them have to be under the gutter to hold it up, instead of using the hidden hangers I use inside the gutter.  Again, the look of an ecto-skeleton like the artist Giger drew for the movie 'Alien'.  They also are not gutters that can support the weight of a ladder leaning against them, so they will get crushed and bent out of shape easily, where cleaning of the gutters is a trial, let alone any other kind of roof maintenance.  

When these gutters are installed using center straps that are then nailed over the roofing is even worse for these issues, yet that is the most common way this style of gutter is mounted by contractors.  I've never seen a good application for using straps to hang gutters with. They are very difficult to install while making sure the level is set right.  Also, with the roof half way over laing the gutter would cause the rain to shoot over the gutter in a heavy downpour.  They were quick to get clogged and soon failed to manage the water and then very hard to clean out, since there is very little room for your hand.  Again, you could not lean a ladder against them to access the roof even more so than with the below gutter support brackets.  They had a high tendency to detach and fall down before long, as the metal straps can only take so much bending back and forth from the wind and other vibrations, so these straps would fatigue and crack or the exposed nails would pull loose.  I've seen it happen many times in my travels.

They latter developed the K-5 gutter machine to form a gutter that resemble the truly classic wood molding that houses were enhanced with.  It is ironic that shortly after that development builders did away with ornamenting new homes with such things as wood molding that was contoured like the K-5 gutters back in the 60's, in order to modernize the fashion of housing, so they claimed.  Truthfully, it was little more than ways to cut corners and save a good deal of money on construction.  Much like the 'Emperor's New Clothes' story, and the people bought it hook line and sinker. Builders also decided that it was passé to include fascia boards covering the ends of the rafter tails or soffit to conceal the bones of the house supporting the roof.  So now we have to stare up at the crude roof joists extending out from the siding to the roof edge, and look at the plywood roof deck that is riddled with roofing nails, which is a wonderful area now for spider webs and wasp nests. More recently we are seeing the resurgence of the more classic styling in the upper scale house building in this country, so the K-5 gutter is making a comeback.

In much of the country, gutters are not a requirement of their local building codes, so most houses do not even have gutters pre-installed as a standard feature.  Here in the NW so near the Coast we get so much more rain that the evidence of weakened and damaged foundation in just a couple decades inspired this to be a mandatory feature on all houses and garages as well and commercial buildings, but why invest in gutters if they will not work or last.

They developed more complex sheet metal roll-forming gutter machines in the classic wood molding shape to make gutters as inconspicuous as possible and replace the actual wood molding there, so there was the K-4 shaped gutter.  It did looked good and inconspicuous, but it has been obsolete before several decades now, since it was too hard to get your hand inside to clean it out.  The 1/2" outer lip and with any roof shingle over-hang only left about 2" to 2.5" of opening on the top.  They also were very quick to fill up with debris and would fail to manage the rain water. There are very few K-4 gutter machines still in operation in the USA these days.

The K-5 gutter machine was developed and became the standard in this industry.  They do make larger gutter machines in a 6", 7" and even an 8" wide pattern, but they take a much wider coil of sheet metal, driving up the cost, and look very conspicuously large on a house.  They are mainly used for large industrial applications that have huge roofs.  There are not many gutter contractors who have this type of machine, since there is so little call for it.

Many times it is not produced from one of these larger continuous gutter machines at all.  Instead, these contractors will make those gutters on a long sheet metal bending machine, bending one edge at a time.  The longest machine in this area is only 30' long, and since it is not a portable machine, transportation is an issue.  Most of these industrial buildings will be over 150' long, so that means there will be 5 or more seams to leak in that distance.  Sadly again is that even though this process is very costly, they will most often use steel sheet metal for these large gutters that will rust though the bottom in less than a couple decades.

Larger gutters, even for industrial applications is not nearly as relevant as the size of the outlets and the number of downspouts a gutter system has.  If the larger gutters will hold more water is only relevant in that when the outlets clog up and the gutter fails, it will last 5 minutes in a heavy downpour instead of only 3 minutes, before it fills up and begins to overflow.  It is much more important that the gutter continue to drain and function as they should.

Some innovative ideas were to install a funnel right into the bottom of the gutter at the outlet.  The funnels are normally used to join 2 downspouts into one.  This allows for a much larger opening for the outlet.  Once the rain water is in a dead fall, there is little need for a larger downspout.  It is better to place a strainer near the ground level to capture any moss and debris that may be in the gutters, relieving any need to get up there on the roof to clear out the clogged gutter.

It is also beneficial to at least make sure that the gutters are level, if not installed with a good grade down towards the outlets.  That is where our focus is with gutter system design and installation, instead of larger gutters as more of a profitable sale, and a fail-safe to avoid warranty issue within the one year warranty that gutter contractors are required to have.

At first the fascia gutter was no deeper than the K-5 gutter.  When they made the plain square gutter or the 'fascia' roll-forming continuous gutter machine, it was made as just a cheaper machine that required fewer and less complicated rollers to form these gutters.  The only reason was to cut corners and save money.  The curves of the K-5 gutter face helps to strengthen the gutter and keep it smooth and straight.  The flat face of the fascia gutters are all buckled and wavy. you can better see it if you look straight down the length of the gutter.

Later they decided that this flat look with a deeper gutter allowed a builder to get away without installing fascia boards across the ends of the rafter tails, or even install the much needed 1"x 3" drip edge sheet metal roof flashing.  See more details of this below.

As we all know, aluminum does not rust.  This is because when raw aluminum is exposed to the air, it will oxidize within minutes and creates a protective shield that stops this oxidization.  That is why it does not decay or rust through like the cheaper steel does.

It has been known to decay from exposure to some chemical reactions.  We have heard that salt water air, right on the coast will cause aluminum to deteriorate, but we have not seen this first hand.  We have made cat litter boxes with painted aluminum, and the urine seems to be acidic enough to break down the paint and even eat away at the aluminum within a year or two.  We have even seen copper gutters deteriorate through the bottom in this area from some sort of chemical reaction.  Perhaps it was the chemicals used to protect the wood shingle roof?

But for rain gutters, we have yet to replace aluminum from such a deterioration.  It seems that wild animal and birds do not deposit enough to affect these external gutters.  A good 70% of our gutter replacement is due largely to the old steel gutters that rusted through.  It is only a matter of sloppy installation that causes the need for the replacement of aluminum gutters, which is far more common an issue than even dented gutters, so strength is a minor issue anyway.

With the introduction of pre-painted aluminum sheet metal for gutters as a cost efficient option, Code Enforcement understood that aluminum is a softer metal and much more prone to denting, so they wrote the code that requires it to be about twice as thick, to compensate for the needed rigidity.  They did not make such a requirement for the downspouts, hence they manufacture them with about as thin a sheet metal as they can.  That is why they are prone to denting so easily.

They claim the reason for the thin sheet metal is that thicker sheet metal could not be run through their downspout forming machine, but they do run the stiffer steel through it.  They recently conceded that the same thickness aluminum sheet metal can be run successfully through it, but they charge twice the price, so none of the other gutter contractors are interested in buying these thicker downspouts.  The suppliers sell downspouts in 8' and 10' lengths, and these contractors also do not want downspouts that are harder to cut into the needed lengths to fit the house they are working on. I use a Bosch cordless 24 volt 10″ Compound Miter Saw to cut downspouts with these days, so this is not an issue for me.  It also cuts copper downspouts.

You may meet gutter sales people that will claim that their steel gutters are a better way to go since steel is a stronger metal.  But what they neglect to tell you that the steel they can buy is a lot thinner than aluminum.  If it were the same thickness, it would destroy the bearings and rollers in their gutter machine, so don't fall for this fallacy.

Building code also changed from 2x4 to 2x6 housing construction for thicker insulation requirements, but normal gutters would not cover the taller rafter tails, so they built the deeper fascia gutter machine.  It had nothing to do with managing rain water better.  It fact they do not work nearly as well for many reasons.

In the design, they narrowed the bottom as much as they could to save sheet metal and still make the taller front and back side, but it still required a sheet metal coil that was 3" wider.  So these contractors went back to using the cheaper steel sheet metal, since the CCB only places a requirement to only provide a one year warranty.

So many of these gutter contractors have gone this route that the wider aluminum pre-painted gutter coils for these machines is special order only.  So now a good 95% of the fascia gutters are run-out in this cheap steel. Don't just take our word for it, feel free to call the local wholesale gutter suppliers to ask what the sales numbers are for 15" steel VS aluminum sales.

I have replaced fascia gutters on several houses that were less than 2 years old, for the reason that they fail to work and the corners are prone to leak.  If you are in the business to replace failed parts, it tells a story.  If we take the time and effort to evaluate these reasons, we can come up with workable solutions.  There are numerous reasons fascia gutters fail:

First off; over 90% of all fascia gutters installed are made with painted steel sheet metal instead of aluminum (see below).  It is because even though they narrowed the bottom of the gutter, these deeper gutters require a 15" coil of sheet metal, instead of the 12" coils of sheet metal used for the K-5 gutter. To fabricate aluminum fascia gutters for you would add 25% to the cost of the parts used, making it impossible to compete in the market, so most all gutter companies that have a fascia gutter machine have reverted to using steel sheet metal to the point that 15" coils of painted aluminum sheet metal are special order only, and not stocked at the local suppliers, adding even more to the cost.

2. The narrower bottom makes it that much harder for the debris that will collect in the gutter to travel side ways.  Causing these gutters to jam up and fail to function.  A deeper gutter is irrelevant.  Even if it were true that they held much more water, when it does clog, that would only benefit you for about 5 to 10 minutes of raining, before it fills to capacity and begins to over flow and dump it's load in a loud and constant splashing of its man made water fall you have purchased. <LOL>

3. It is much more important that they do not clog and your gutters continue to drain the rain water down the downspouts, as they were meant to. With the narrow bottom, it limits the size of the hole that leads into the downspouts.  I would be unable to provide the no-clog warranty to this type of gutter.

4. Most fascia gutter machines have been designed to bend a small lip on the back of the gutter to go under the roofing and over the plywood.  This is a fact.  There is no other way these gutters can be installed.  If they were installed with this lip over the shingles, the rain water would dribble behind the gutter and rot out the wood that the gutter is attached to, and there is no space between the plywood and the rafter or fascia board.  The only way to alter the angle of the horizontal placement would be to push the roofing shingles up on one end.  That would be very difficult to do with a gutter longer than 10 feet long, so I have rarely seen this done.  Especially with wood or tile roofing.  Most all fascia gutter installations I have seen have a substantial amount of standing water build-up in perfectly clean gutters, so this will of course accelerate the deterioration of these steel gutters.

5. A new gutter machine costs from $5k to $10k (mine costing the latter), and I would need to have a completely different machine for each shape.  The K-5 machines are fairly universal in their basic shape, but there are over a dozen or so different fascia styles. It is a real pain if you have to call around to match it up if you had to replace a damaged gutter.  Not to mention that many contractors would lie to you, saying they have the right machine, and once installed, bank on the fact that few people would go to all the trouble to force them to remove it and refund their money.

6. One of the most common irritation with home owners who have fascia gutters are the downspout installation with most of these fascia gutters that do not have the curved elbows that are made for the plain square steel downspouts.  The owners of the gutter company are too cheap to buy them, so they instruct their installers to cut the straight downspout sections with a hack saw and fold these pipes.  This type of installation will only work in a completely debris free situation, but they are still much more noisy, since the over-lap causes a dead fall of water that will make a pinging sound for hours after it has stopped raining as the roof and gutters slowly drain.

7. Building code here in Oregon only requires a one year warranty, and in most cases, this is a short enough time to avoid any warranty issues. To make sure that they will not have to deal with an upset client, they will often install the inexpensive strainers in the gutters at the outlet. They really do not care at all about the issue of a clogged underground drain pipe, since this would not affect their warranty responsibility at all.  It is only to avoid your call back issue within that first year of service because the downspout jammed up.  These strainers will block up most of the debris, and that debris will begin to decompose and turn to mud, and at that point will not even let water pass.  If you were to call them about it, they will simply tell you that your gutters need cleaned out, and remind you that they are not responsible for keeping your gutters clean.  These strainers are death to any gutter, let alone steel gutters.

Is that enough reasons for you?

Below is a photo of our
Better Business Bureau's
NW Business Integrity Award
for the year 1998

We were also a 1997 finalist for this same award. See our referral web page to see how we managed to be honored with this special award