DIY Gutter Cleaning vs Hiring a Professional

Melbourne is renowned for its inclement and ever-changing weather. High winds and rain can lead to dropped leaves at any time of the year. So, the best time to clean your gutters, if you live in Melbourne, is now (this applies to any month of the year!)

Autumn throws a lot of rotting leaves into our gutters and a blocked gutter can overflow and cause water damage on your roof. Save yourself the headache and cost of water damage by cleaning your gutters now.

But how?

Can you clean your gutters yourself – can you effectively DIY gutter cleaning or do you need to hire a professional? You can do either, it’s down to preference. But how do you decide? In this article we will breakdown the advantages of DIY Gutter cleaning and its risks and compare it to the advantages of hiring gutter cleaning professionals and the risks.

Advantages of DIY Gutter Cleaning

Cleaning your own gutters has some clear advantages:

1. It’s cheap, or completely free if you already have the tools you’ll need
2. You can clean your gutters on your own schedule, ie. Whenever suits you
3. Privacy

There are advantages to DIY gutter cleaning but there aren’t that many, certainly not when you weigh them up against the risks of cleaning your own gutters.

Risks of DIY Gutter Cleaning

We all have a friend or family member who has climbed a ladder they knew they shouldn’t and apparently 5 Australians die every year from accidents with ladders. They’re dangerous and the higher the roof, the greater the danger.

DIY gutter cleaning can be cheap, but with a lack of experience comes a lack of knowledge. Inexpertly cleaning your gutters could lead to damage for which you wouldn’t be insured and you could miss existing faults on your gutter pipes that you were unaware of. These faults could lead to water damage down the track. Therefore, inexperience can lead to multiple failure points with DIY gutter cleaning.

Don’t forget mess! DIY gutter cleaning makes a huge mess! All those rotting leaves and going to go somewhere, so you’ll have to make sure your green waste bin has some room.

Advantages of Gutter Cleaners Professionals

The alternative to DIY gutter cleaning is to hire a professional gutter cleaning expert. Gutter cleaning professionals will use specialist equipment, like a truck-mounted vacuum. This vacuum has industrial levels of suction that you’re not going to get from your everyday home maintenance equipment. They remove the detritus and collect the waste. This means no waste and mess for you to deal with most customers are completely surprised by the sheer volume of debris within their gutters.

They’re experienced with roofs of all kinds, so they’ll be able to manoeuvre around your property causing no damage and if there are any existing faults to your gutters, they’ll spot them and be able to advise on next steps.

If you hire a professional, they do the work and you don’t have to. You don’t have to spend the hours in the cold winter unclogging your gutters at the top of a ladder.

Disadvantages of Gutter Cleaning Professionals

The main disadvantages of hiring a gutter cleaning professional are that it’s not free and you would need to organise an appointment.

So, when it comes to cleaning the gutters this winter we have helped lay out DIY gutter cleaning vs hiring a gutter cleaning professional. It’s down to you which you choose, but according to our breakdown the advantages of hiring a professional far outweigh the benefits of DIY gutter cleaning.

We hope that you got some value from this guide. If you want a gutter cleaning professional service provider in Melbourne to inspect your roof and clean the gutters, contact PorterVac today.