Gutter cleaning in Columbus

What a cleaning includes

• Every foot of gutter cleared by hand into a bucket — not blown into the flower beds or onto the driveway
• Every downspout flushed with a hose from the top and checked for flow at the bottom
• Debris bagged and hauled away
• A ladder check of corners, seams, hangers and fascia, with photos of anything that needs attention
• Splash blocks and extensions put back where the mower or the snowblower moved them

The flush is the part that matters. A downspout plugged with a season of maple seeds and one tennis ball will back up a perfectly clean gutter, and you won't know until it overflows at the corner in a storm — or, worse, until it freezes solid in January and splits the elbow.

When to clean gutters in Columbus

Late November or early December, after the pin oaks finally let go. Oaks in Clintonville and Upper Arlington hang onto their leaves until well after the maples are bare, so a mid-October cleaning under oaks is a cleaning you'll pay for twice. Late May or June, after the silver maple seeds and the cottonwood fluff. Homes under pines or spruces need a summer visit as well. If you have good guards, once a year in December is usually enough. The fall leaf-season guide has the tree-by-tree timing.

The November cleaning is the important one — it's the gutter cleaning Columbus Ohio winters actually demand. Gutters that go into winter full of wet leaves hold water, freeze into a solid block, and either sag under the weight or overflow behind the gutter onto the fascia when the ice dam melts. Half the re-hangs we do in March started as a skipped fall cleaning.

Pricing

Cleaning is priced by the house, not the hour. Single-story homes run $120–$200, two-story $180–$300, and large or complicated roofs are quoted after we see them. If we find a repair while we're up there, the cleaning fee comes off the repair price. No charge for the inspection photos, and no upsell — if the gutters are fine, we say so and leave.

Cleaning that turns into a repair

About one cleaning in four turns something up. In order of how often we see it in Columbus: a downspout elbow that separated over the winter; spike hangers backed out on the north side where the ice sat longest; a corner weeping on the sunny side where the sealant dried out; soft fascia under a corner that's overflowed for years. We show you the photo and give you a price on the spot, good for 30 days.

What cleaning won't fix

A clean gutter that still overflows is undersized, pitched wrong, or short a downspout. We'll tell you which, but a cleaning doesn't change it. And a clean gutter under a big silver maple in Beechwold will be full again by June. If we're cleaning the same gutters twice a year and the trees aren't going anywhere, we'll suggest gutter guards — not as a pitch, but because the math starts to favor them around year six.

Doing it yourself

Single-story ranch, a decent extension ladder, and someone holding it: go ahead. Gloves, a bucket hooked on the ladder, flush each downspout from the top. Stop when the ladder has to lean on the gutter (it will crush it), when you're reaching more than an arm's length sideways, when there's frost on the rungs, or when the eave is two stories up. A fair number of the gutter cleaning Columbus calls we get every December are from someone who did the front of the house and thought better of the back. The second half costs the same as the whole.