Gutter Cleaning — Bluff Road, Hampton

Concrete tiles lose their surface granules as they age. The grit washes down with every rain and settles under the leaf litter as a dense, wet sludge that holds water and weighs several times what the leaves do. It is easy to miss: lift the leaves, look into the channel, and it reads as clean until you put a hand in.

The leaves came off first, then the grit layer underneath, which had to be drawn out rather than lifted — it does not hold together. Each downpipe was checked separately, because grit travels further than leaf litter and settles at the outlet. On a single-storey run three and a half hours is a long visit, and almost all of it went on the material below the surface.

• Leaf litter cleared from the full gutter run
• Grit layer beneath the leaves drawn out separately
• Downpipes checked and cleared individually
• Channel taken back to the metal, not just the surface
• Flow confirmed along the run
• Before and after photographs supplied

• Gutter clear to the base, grit layer removed
• Downpipes running free of settled grit
• Weight of wet sludge off the gutter brackets
• Granule loss from the tiles noted for the owner