Gutter Cleaning — Morey Street, Camberwell

Grass does not grow in a gutter that has leaf in it. It grows in a gutter that has turned into a garden bed: leaf that broke down into soil years ago, holding enough moisture between rains for seed to germinate and root. Once that happens the material stops behaving like debris. The roots bind it into a mat that will not travel to an outlet and will not flush, and the mat holds water against the gutter the whole time instead of letting it drain away. On a two-storey house none of that is visible from the ground until it is coming over the edge.

The full run was cleared from ground level with SkyVac vacuum equipment rather than off the roof, and on this house that mattered twice over. It is two storeys, and the roof is Colorbond. Sheet steel does not crack the way terracotta does. It dents between its fixings, and the coating scratches, and a scratch through the coating on a steel roof is where corrosion starts. Staying off it is not caution for its own sake, it is the difference between cleaning a roof and starting a problem on one. Vacuum extraction also lifts a root mat out in pieces rather than dragging it along the gutter base towards an outlet it was never going to fit through. Each downpipe was then opened and checked for flow.

• Full gutter run cleared from ground level with SkyVac vacuum equipment
• No access onto the Colorbond roof at any point
• Rooted material lifted out rather than flushed or dragged to the outlets
• Downpipes opened, cleared and checked for flow
• Debris bagged and taken away rather than left on site

• Two technicians, four hours
• Full run clear and downpipes flowing
• Nothing walked on the sheet roof