Autumn gutter clearing: why the timing matters more than the frequency
Nearly every answer online says twice a year. That is a schedule for selling visits, not a specification for a gutter.
Clear your gutters once, after leaf fall has finished on the trees nearest your house and before the first long spell of wet weather. In southern England that is usually late November or early December, not September. The exception is evergreen and semi-evergreen planting, which sheds through winter and into spring and needs a second look in May.
The short version
- “Twice a year” is a booking schedule, not a maintenance answer. Two clears at the wrong times do less than one at the right time.
- Your date is set by the trees within about two house-widths of the wall.
- A blocked gutter is a masonry problem. Water goes over the back edge, down one strip of wall, into the joints, and freezes there in January.
- The valley, the flat roof outlet and the hopper head cause the expensive leaks.
- If you rent privately, the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 names gutters as your landlord’s responsibility.
The received answer
“Twice a year” is an answer about visits, not about gutters
Nearly every page telling you to clear gutters twice a year is written by somebody who sells gutter clearing, and two visits is a good business: predictable, spread across the year, easy to sell as a package.
A gutter has no opinion about how often you have been up there. It holds a certain volume, and once debris fills it past a point the water goes over the back edge instead of down the outlet. What matters is whether it is clear when the rain arrives in quantity.
So clear in September, on a street of ash, sycamore and lime, and you clear before most of the material has arrived. By early December it is full again, and you either pay for a second visit or go into January blocked, which is the worst month of the year for it. Clear once in late November and it stays empty through the wet season. One clear at the right time beats two at the wrong times.
Working out your date
The window moves with the trees, not with the calendar
Leaf fall runs to a different timetable for every species, and what fills your gutter is what grows within about two house-widths of the wall.
Holm oak is the one that catches people out. It looks evergreen and is really semi-evergreen, dropping last year’s leaves in April and May as the new growth comes through. That matters more here than nationally: along the coast, and on the sandy heath soils of Dorset especially, shelter planting leans on holm oak and on Monterey and Corsican pine, which take salt wind and thin soil where a beech will not. A house fringed with that has a later and blurrier window than the same house four miles inland.
| Nearest planting | When the litter arrives | What that means for your clear |
|---|---|---|
| Ash, sycamore, horse chestnut, lime, birch | Late September to mid-November | One clear in late November catches nearly all of it |
| Oak | Through November, some into December | Push it back to the first week of December |
| Beech, hornbeam | Holds dead leaves all winter, releases them in February gales | Expect a top-up after the first hard blow of the year |
| Pine and other conifers | All year, heaviest in autumn | Needles pack tighter than leaves. Check the outlet |
| Holm oak and other evergreen oaks | Sheds the previous year’s leaves in April and May | The second visit belongs in late spring |
Work off the trees, not the diary. And gutter guards, since they will come up: they stop a leaf mat but not fine litter, so under a conifer they silt up and you still have to go up and lift them off to check.
Why it matters
A blocked gutter is a masonry problem, not a rainwater problem
The damage a blocked gutter does is almost never in the gutter. When it fills, water comes over the back edge, the edge against the fascia, and runs down the face of the wall. It runs down the same strip every time it rains, because the blockage does not move, so one narrow band of brickwork is fed all winter while the rest of the elevation dries out.
Brick and mortar are porous on purpose: Approved Document C, on resistance to moisture, is about a wall that takes a wetting and dries out again. None is built to be fed at one point for weeks, and by Christmas that panel is saturated through.
Then it freezes. Water expands as it turns to ice, and in a saturated brick face there is nowhere for that expansion to go, so the face lifts off in flakes and the joint alongside turns to sand you can rake out with a fingernail. The damage is done in the wet spell and only shows on the thaw, which is why people blame February for a gutter that filled in October. That sequence is set out in why frost damage to brickwork and paving shows up after the thaw.
Indoors it shows as a damp patch high on a wall, worse after three days of steady rain than after a cloudburst. Lower down, suspect the downpipe instead: damp at the bottom of a wall, gutter overflows in heavy rain.
Clearing a gutter is an afternoon. Cutting out spalled brick and repointing the panel of wall underneath is access, raking out, matching a mortar and waiting on the weather. A different order of job, avoidable with a bin bag in November.
The parts you cannot see
The gutter is the part you think about. The valley is the part that leaks.
If leaf litter is going to cost you serious money, it will not be in the gutter.
Valleys
Where two slopes meet, the valley takes the water off both of them down a channel no wider than a gutter, and it sits in still air, so what lands in it stays. Once it packs, water backs up sideways under the tiles above the level the lap was meant to cope with and goes into the battens and rafters rather than down the wall. That is the expensive leak, and by the time it marks a ceiling the timber has been wet for months. You can usually see a valley from an upstairs window.
Flat roof outlets
A flat roof over an extension or a garage sheds to one or two outlets, often a single one in a corner. One handful of leaves over the grating and the roof becomes a tank. Standing water is heavy, finds every weak lap, and will not drain itself. On an otherwise sound flat roof the outlet is the commonest point of failure.
Hopper heads
The open box at the head of a downpipe on older and taller houses, often fed by a valley or a parapet gutter. Wide mouth, so it catches everything, and it sits at the highest and most awkward point on the elevation, so it gets skipped. Blocked, it empties down the wall.
The fourth place is the only one genuinely safe for anybody: the ground end. Rainwater has to reach a proper outfall, which is what Approved Document H, on drainage and waste disposal, covers, and a gully choked with mulch floods the base of a wall as surely as a blocked gutter floods the top. Gloves, no height, so do that first, then work through our roof checks to do before winter, from the ground.
Doing it yourself
Ladders, and the thing that actually causes the falls
The Health and Safety Executive does not ban ladders, and be wary of anyone who tells you it does. Its published position is that ladders are not banned and that they suit low-risk, short-duration work. It also says a ladder should not automatically be your first choice, and that conditions apply. From HSE guidance on when and how to use a ladder safely:
- Level, firm ground, and the ladder secured where reasonably practicable. Tied at the top is best.
- A competent user, meaning somebody shown how, not somebody who got away with it last year.
- A pre-use check every single time. Stiles, rungs, feet.
- Short duration only. HSE measures that in minutes rather than hours, and gives as a guide that more than thirty minutes on the ladder means using different equipment.
Now the part that matters more than any of it. Gutter work is not one position. A run of gutter is far longer than your reach from one set-up, so the job is: climb, clear an arm’s length, come down, shift the ladder a metre and a half, climb again. On a two-storey elevation that is a dozen moves for one gutter, and the alternative to every one of them is leaning across instead.
That lean is what causes the falls. Once your belt buckle passes outside the stile your weight is outside the base and the ladder walks sideways. It is almost never ignorance, it is the last twelve inches of gutter and the thought of climbing down again. Buckle stays between the stiles, and if you have to reach, you move the ladder.
Before you touch the ladder. HSE’s position is that you should not consider going on any roof in poor weather conditions such as rain, ice, frost or strong winds, particularly gusting winds, or if slippery conditions exist. The same guidance notes that winds in excess of 23mph will affect a person’s balance. That is a fresh breeze, not a gale, and late autumn is when the gutter needs doing and when those conditions turn up.
A single-storey rear gutter, feet on a level lawn, is within a lot of people. A two-storey front gutter over a concrete path, with a bay window throwing the ladder out of vertical, is not. And that applies to us: if the wind is up, nobody is on that ladder.
If you rent
Gutters are named in the statute, so this is not a tenant’s job
If you are a private tenant you should not be up a ladder clearing a gutter, and you should not be paying somebody else to do it. The law names gutters rather than leaving them to be argued over.
Section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 implies a covenant into almost every short residential tenancy. The landlord must keep in repair the structure and exterior of the dwelling-house, including drains, gutters and external pipes. That is the statutory wording, and the word gutters is in it. A tenancy agreement saying otherwise does not change it.
So report it in writing, keep a copy, and give the landlord or agent a reasonable chance to sort it. Photographs of the staining outside are worth more than a description of the gutter. If you are told clearing is maintenance rather than repair, that stops working the moment water is coming through the wall. In a leasehold flat the job usually sits with the freeholder under the lease.
Next steps
What to do about it this autumn
In order, and the first three involve no height at all.
- Note what grows within about two house-widths of each elevation, and whether it is deciduous or evergreen. That sets your date.
- Clear the gully at the foot of every downpipe, and the grating over it.
- From an upstairs window, look along every valley and at any flat roof outlet.
- Then wait. When the nearest deciduous trees are bare, give it a week and clear. For most southern houses that is late November or early December.
- With holm oak, pine or a conifer hedge close by, pencil in a second look for late May.
- Decide honestly whether the ladder work is yours. Dry day, still air, level ground, somebody indoors who knows you are out there, and no reaching.
- Through the next wet spell watch the wall, not the gutter. A strip still darkening after a clear means the fall, the back edge or a joint needs looking at.
If a wall has already had a winter of it, the gutter is the cheap half of the job and the brickwork is the other half. Both sit with us, so it can be looked at as one job rather than two trades pointing at each other: see roofing, gutters and rainwater goods, or ask for a free site visit. Thomas comes out himself and will tell you if it can wait.
Questions
Questions we get asked about this
How often should gutters be cleared?
For most houses once a year is enough, provided it is done at the right time. One clear after leaf fall has finished and before the wet season sets in does more than two clears in September and March. Houses under conifers or evergreen oaks need a second look in late spring.
Is September too early to clear gutters?
Usually, yes. In September most deciduous trees have barely started, so a September clear means the gutter refills by December and you are blocked through the wettest and coldest months. Late November or early December is the better single date for most of southern England.
Can a blocked gutter really damage a wall?
Yes, and that is the main risk. Water goes over the back edge of the gutter and runs down one strip of wall every time it rains. That strip stays saturated, and saturated brick and mortar spall when the water inside them freezes. The damage shows on the thaw, months after the cause.
Whose responsibility are the gutters if I rent?
Your landlord's. Section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 requires the landlord to keep the structure and exterior in repair and names drains, gutters and external pipes specifically. Report it in writing and keep a copy of the message.
Are gutter guards worth fitting?
Under large deciduous trees they earn their keep by stopping the leaf mat. Under pines, yew or a Leylandii hedge they silt up with fine litter instead, you still have to go up and check, and you now have to lift the guard off to do it.
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Who wrote this
Thomas Hannen
Thomas owns Bournemouth Roofing & Building and prices every job himself rather than sending somebody else. The company is Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, number 15471719, registered in England and Wales. If you want to talk something through before you commit to anything, the site visit and the written itemised quote are both free.
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Gutter overflowing onto the wall?
Thomas comes out himself, looks at the gutter, the valley and the wall underneath, and puts in writing what he found and what it would take to put right.