Our Minds are in the Gutters

It was pretty obvious that our front gutters had a problem. This was the way the water was flowing during our last summer thunderstorm:

Isn't the water supposed to go INTO the downspout?

The gutter is a little bent up from when a tree branch fell into it years ago, but it has always worked just fine despite that. We thought this was an installation issue after we got new siding. The siding company had had to come back and tighten the new back gutters, so it was possible the blockages was related to re-installing the front. But since these were our original copper gutters and downspout, we didn't want to drag them back out if it wasn't due to their installation. We figured we'd see what we could do first.

Cue a very long morning that involved attempting to send water down--and a plumbing snake up--the downspout. Here we are trying to fill the downspout with a hose to see how quickly it filled up. It seemed like the clog was at the bottom, based on what we could hear. We also couldn't push the hose all the way through to the bottom, so something was likely in the way.

Time for the snake (well, first, time to spend 10 minutes trying to *find* the snake in the basement, shed, and garage...). After detaching the downspout from the corrugated pipe, D spent quite a while trying to unclog everything, since it seemed like our best option. The snake did make it all the way up the downspout and barely dislodged anything, but repeated attempts to send water down it made it clear the clog was still there. He spent a while doing this over and over again, each time pulling out only a small amount of debris.

We hesitated to move on to the next step but reluctantly decided to cut the copper pipe. From knocking on the downspout and listening to the sound, we were pretty confident the clog was just past the bend. We didn't want to lose the angle though, so we cut to where we figured we'd be able to reach up and get it. We figured we could always cut higher if we had to.

And there it was! So much debris. Lots of leaves and decaying gunk. Fortunately no squirrel bodies this time (you think I'm kidding but note there's a link to an old post so...). I guess the plumber's snake was just too thin and flexible to break up all the debris.

This time we could send the hose all the way through. 

Obviously we couldn't reattach the copper part that D had sawed off (we have a lot of fancy toys but not a heavy duty soldering iron). So we just used more corrugated pipe to bridge the gap.

The next step, obviously, is buying some gutter guards. Our gutters are narrow (the siding folks said they don't usually install this width anymore, opting for greater capacity) but it does seem like a few options are available for sale. We're just trying to figure out what to purchase. Hopefully we get the guards on before everything clogs again.