Fire Safety For Solar Homes: Get Your Gutters To Clean Themselves

With fire season in full swing, it is worth considering what you can do to maintain your home, even if solar on the roof makes things a little tricky.

Clearing gutters is a never ending chore but the question that’s always bothered me is; why can’t anyone offer self cleaning solution that really works?

How Does Solar Affect Roof Maintenance?

If you have an overhaul in mind for your house – say a re-roof and insulation upgrade before you install solar – bear in mind that the new glass on the roof can obstruct roof maintenance activities important for fire safety, as I explained last week.

One of the most crucial chores up on the roof is clearing the gutters.

As a child I was often the chief gutter cleaner at home and as a roofer I’ve seen a dozen different approaches to supposedly reduce maintenance.

The answer is a blend of tradition and aesthetic I’m sure, mixed with an unhealthy dose of what will the neighbours think!?

Here’s the thing: unless the neighbours are offering to clean your gutters regularly, you’re not obliged to care what they think. What’s more important, especially during the fire season, is that the place is well maintained.

Read on while we outline the best solution for reducing your fire risk and extending the life of your gutters.

Standard Practice Is A Liability

For those who’ve looked through the building rules, there are specifications on gutter size, overflow slots and rates of fall. Plus there’s calculations on the number and size of downpipes for a given roof area.

There are also cross sectional diagrams that show your roof cladding must protrude at least 50mm into the gutter. This is deemed essential to make sure the rain runs off the sheet and doesn’t end up tracking back along the underside, down the fascia, or anywhere else it shouldn’t.

Garden variety gutter installation with variety of garden debris decomposing into wet sludge. Blue arrow shows cladding quite deep behind the outer edge.

However if you’re in Darwin, all that goes out the window. They don’t bother with any of it because during wet season, gutters are about as useful as trying to catch a deluge in a paper cup.

Darwinites are pretty relaxed, so nobody bats an eyelid at the corrugated edge of a roof being visible.

Screening The Ideas

Gutters are a curse, channelling more leaves than water. And the gutter guards of various kinds aren’t much better.

There are many novel products like flashings, screens, or oversized bottle brushes and they all work on the idea of keeping the leaves out of the gutter, so they tend to dry and then blow away.

However conventional solutions you buy and retrofit are something I would never contemplate. My best carpenter mate will rant at length about how much he hates them, and he’s had a career dealing with them when installing pergolas.

Years ago I did this experiment on a low pitched garden shed. It worked but the coarse mesh had holes which were the perfect size to trap gumnuts.

There’s plastic mesh that cracks and falls apart, hundreds of holes with clips held by tiny screws, edges that catch pine needles and leaves, metal sieves that actually prevent you cleaning the gutter.

Imagine trying to drain your spaghetti by pouring it onto outside of an upturned colander. Retrofit mesh, screwed down to the outside of the house is just as silly.

This roof was a couple of months old and despite gutter mesh screwed on top, was already collecting pine needles when we had to temporarily remove part of it to install solar.

About the only off-the-shelf systems I think are worthwhile are those fitted to a tile roof, which lap under the first row of tiles and are grouted under the ridges. However it is expensive work and tiles are hateful things anyway.

Set Your Gutter On Autopilot

The key to making your gutters clean themselves is this:

Put the mesh under the cladding.

Hang the gutters lower than usual.

The concepts aren’t rocket science but if you have a builder doing the work you’ll probably have make the point more than once (or show them this article).

Proof Is In The Pudding

I have done the experiment in a few places, but none show the results more vividly than two identical sheds which were built two years and one metre apart.

This gutter has a little dirt and dust, but it’s not full of mud which causes rust.

This newer shed has gutters chock full of wet leaves but it looks nice from the ground

There was nothing particularly special or difficult about doing this installation. The stainless mesh came from the hardware shop and everything else was just standard shed parts, though external gutter brackets would make for a better job.

The only real change here is that the gutters are hung a little lower than normal. While some pedants might argue the sheets aren’t IN the gutter, lifting them to the conventional height would just create a deep ledge to collect leaves.

This could actually have been lower to make it better at self cleaning, but either way it stops large volumes of crap collecting in the gutter.

By lowering the gutter there’s less chance that leaves and sticks will stop at the edge. However what does collect will be a smaller volume that’s easier to shift with a garden blower or broom. What doesn’t blow away dries out. You no longer have a matt of compost rusting the gutter & growing weeds upstream of your rainwater tank.

The only compromise is that you’ll be more likely to see the wrinkly edge of the roof – depending on the elevation of course.

Accept No Substitute

With building work, you have to realise the industry is pretty conservative, and not necessarily in a good way. Builders are good at conserving effort as well as profit. They like to do what they know and new ideas, however good, are a challenge to this tradition.

Of course there’s good reasons for sticking to your knitting – in some instances standard building products like metal fascia and internal gutter clips won’t allow for much variation in measurement. Plus we have reams and reams of rules to explain how things should be done and hopefully prevent corner cutting and shoddy work.

In fact the image below shows a roof that was cut short. With hardly any overhang, water dripping off the sheets would blow back, run down behind the gutter and drip from the fascia. Without the expense of a re-roof, it presented an opportunity to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

This aluminium gutter mesh has been in place for years now. It just works.

Firstly I found a supplier of gutter mesh and after explaining what I was doing, convinced them to sell me a whole 1 metre wide roll of aluminium mesh. I was surprised to see they cut it with a stanley knife but I prefer roofing snips.

The standard kits they sold included 200mm wide mesh, plus clips, screws and angle flashings for $15/metre?[1.That price of $15 might be wildly inaccurate] The whole roll gave me 4 times more material for the same linear metre price, and the option to cut strips in the widths and lenghts I needed.

The process looked like this :

1. Old gutter removed and the timber fascia repaired where needed.
2. Fascia covered with a simple J shaped metal flashing in durable colourbond finish, saving hours of sanding and painting.
3. New external gutter brackets installed around 40mm lower than the old ones (you may need to paint these to match).
4. New gutters installed & joined.
5. Unique new flashing installed as a flange that extends up under the roof sheets and down into the gutter (this means the short roof sheets would spill into the gutter no matter what).
6. Finally the aluminium mesh, cut into 200mm wide strips, was dragged under the roof sheets and positioned.
7. Bottom row of screws was reinstalled to secure the sheets and the mesh.

Solar Is Part Of  A Suite

Whether you’re just looking for some energy bill relief or planning to make a stand with durable renovations on your forever home, it’s worth thinking about what you’ll need when the hot water service goes bang, the stove turns up its toes or the roof starts leaking.

A little planning goes a long way to getting the best results. Being that falls disproportionately affect the older homeowner, anything that keeps you off the ladder is a good thing.

This is the latest in our series on solar and bushfires – read our stories on why you need to maintain solar in high bushfire risk zones, and on what to actually do with your solar and battery should you need to evacuate.