A programmer trying to fix roof gutter overflow

http://chethiya3000.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-programmer-trying-to-fix-roof-gutter.html

by chethiya • 12 years ago

34 30 12 years ago

chethiya3000.blogspot.com

chiph• 12 years ago

My concern is that there's a roof slope pointing at a wall of the house, rather than away. That's just asking for trouble.

chethiya6• 12 years ago

Ya that's true, there is a design issue. The house was build around 20 years back. But it's not a great issue as it's supposed to get water from a small area of roof.

ck2• 12 years ago

there are high number of Dengue deaths in Sri Lanka whereas blocked gutters with water are good breeding grounds for mosquitoes

Should have led with that, I would have read with more interest.

I could be wrong but putting mesh over gutters is already fairly common in the USA.

chethiya6• 12 years ago

Yes that's the problem. It seems to be pretty common in developed countries. But such a simple thing is not common at all in this part of the world. That's why I think there is so much to do for entrepreneurs in this part of the world

wging• 12 years ago

Might the problem be wealth? I don't know how things work in Sri Lanka, but as a programmer, are you not making more money than many Sri Lankans? If gutter guards are more expensive compared to an average person's income then that could help explain it.

I don't know how expensive they are here, but I'd be surprised if they were very expensive. Maybe someone else has actual data.

In that case the entrepreneurial challenge is to bring the cost down enough that people will see gutter guards as worth buying.

logn• 12 years ago

These work well: http://www.leafproof.com/how_it_works.html

chethiya6• 12 years ago

Yup. Thanks for pointing that out. I couldn't find about the s-bend technology. Unfortunately, as I've mentioned in the blog post the lack of standards followed causes a great trouble adopting these technologies. Mostly used roof sheets in Sri Lanka are similar to what's there in my roof (~~~~ shaped)

brudgers2• 12 years ago

Water flows downhill. There is no hacking bulk water infiltration. It's presence in a structure only indicates one thing technical debt in the architecture.

chethiya6• 12 years ago

I wish I could correct the architecture, as I would rewrite a code if something goes wrong of this nature in a software I write. But unfortunately, it's not feasible at this point.

brudgers2• 12 years ago

Designing buildings is somewhat like software development without type checking, unit tests, and compiler warnings - and that's for professionals with good tools and a formal design process.

Looking at the pictures my advice would be to keep the roof free of debris as the first strategy. Second strategy is to make each drainage path independent, I.e. don't dump water from one roof/gutter onto/into another roof/gutter. Third strategy is use primary and secondary drains. secondary drains should do two things, handle excess load and make their use obvious to signal problems with the primary.

The screens on the lower gutter may make your problem worse due to a lack of scouring and creating a dam at the top of the gutter rather than the bottom. Better to reduce the volume this gutter handles.

Finally the goal is always water management not water proofing. Assume the first system leaks and handle those leaks with a backup. And of course never depend on water running uphill.

Good luck.

jessaustin2• 12 years ago

A "fix" I see with some regularity (especially for flat roofs on mobile homes) is to build an entirely new roof above the leaking roof, supported by long poles driven into the ground surrounding the structure. This may not be feasible for you, but it certainly seems to be for people around here. The additional roof is very simple sheet metal, and isn't even heavy enough to require trusses. In many cases it doesn't even require a peak, being sloped all in the same direction.

geon• 12 years ago

Yes. Having a roof sloping towards a wall is a big no-no. That's the kind of standardization and building code regulation needed.

jessaustin2• 12 years ago

Stated with respect to a different (semi-)liquid medium, I've heard your first sentence called "The Fundamental Law of Plumbing, and also Politics".

joshuaheard2• 12 years ago

I hate to burst your hacking bubble, but this product has been around for a long time. You can find several models at Home Depot or your local home store.

gambiting• 12 years ago

You didn't even read the article, did you?

chethiya6• 12 years ago

Ya as I mentioned in the post it's nothing new. But what's discussed in the latter half of the post is why it is not available half way around the world from USA.

joshuaheard2• 12 years ago

I stopped reading halfway through. If I have a major point in an article, it usually include it in the introduction.

mcv• 12 years ago

Do you realize that the nearest Home Depot is half a world away? All of this has been addressed in the article.

icameron• 12 years ago

Hey looks great! My house had gutter guard netting like this too. I had to remove mine after a couple years because small leaves and pine needles still made it through the net and I couldn't clean them up without removing the gutter guard. Another use for gutter guard net I've seen around is for custom car grilles.

Back to gutters, best of luck. Have you heard of gutter cleaning robots?

chethiya6• 12 years ago

Hey I agree with you that gutter guards will never stop accumulation of debris, it will just slow it down. Selection of cell size might be a good way to optimize it depending on the type of leaves getting on roof.

BTW gutter cleaning robot is really impressive to me. It's a much cleaner solution to the problem. Only worry I have about that is financial viability considering the robot might have to be water resistant, shock resistant, etc. Of course that'll change depending on the country.

projct• 12 years ago

iRobot makes the Looj for this, maybe you could model something after it?

babesh• 12 years ago

How about designing gutters so that they are easier to get to and clean?

stevewilhelm• 12 years ago

My personal experience with gutter guards has been mixed. They work for a while, but smaller debris and nesting creatures eventually get into the gutters and then it's really difficult to clean the gutter.

An alternative to gutter guards we have here in the States is gutter cleaning services.

A subscription-based gutter cleaning service in Sri Lanka might be a interesting startup.

pistle• 12 years ago

This is a short-term fix. Eventually you will need to get up and clear it out manually again. Either you will end up with a large mass over the whole thing or smaller debris will continue to get through the chicken wire and eventually create a clog. The water will either pool a different way or you will be redirecting water to some other area it is not wanted.

Regular, manual maintenance will be the only way apart from refactoring the building. This might just push the problem to other areas of the system which also don't scale.

You could also invert the gutter. Rather than be a tube that can clog, use open materials that guide debris to where you'd like it, but are designed to release debris along the path should it start to collect. Something like a rain chain or spiral for downspouts. Shallow, wide channels could direct water to the edges and then overhang could help "pour" the water to the downspout.

btilly• 12 years ago

The comment about people building houses half-way, moving in, and then finishing them rang a bell. The reason why people do this is not that they are poor, it is that you have a messed up property system.

I recently read http://www.amazon.com/The-Mystery-Capital-Capitalism-Everywh... which explains this. The problem arises when the formal property system fails to capture the actual contracts that actual people live by, and makes it unbelievably hard for someone outside of the legal system to get into it. Then you get a situation where people live in houses, but cannot prove their title, and this causes all sorts of complications such as the necessity of bribing government officials (because they are squatters) and the impossibility of getting loans.

By contrast if the formal property system is fixed, you get a situation where professionals can build a house, then sell it to a person who mortgages it, and then pays it off slowly. The overall cost of building the house is less, the quality of the house is better, it simply makes sense to do things right. But this is impossible without formal property because nobody can make money building houses that nobody else can afford, and banks can't lend people that much money without having a way to reclaim property if people fail to pay. So people are stuck building their houses slowly and expensively.

And this is one of a myriad of ways in which it is bad for a country to have the formal property system out of sync with the actual contracts by which people live by.

The theory sounded great, but does it work in practice? Well the country where the author got to try his ideas out was Peru. Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Peru it seems that the lot of the average Peruvian has indeed continued improving since the book was written, so that's reasonable evidence that his theory works.

steven2012• 12 years ago

I'm not sure what the conditions of houses are in Sri Lanka, but in the US, if water poured into my room, the thing I would most be worried about is mold in between the ceilling, walls, etc.

bluedino• 12 years ago

I love the slideout on the right that covers the scrollbar.

R_Edward• 12 years ago

The fellow across the street from me saw the gutters going up on my house, and decided he just had to have gutters too. The contractor he called did a sales job on him, and he sprang for the so-called gutter helmets in addition to the gutters.

The "Gutter Helmet" is, essentially, a sheet of aluminium with a single slot along its length that allows rainwater into the gutters, while keeping (most of) the leaf debris out of the gutters. It's probably more of a necessity on houses surrounded by mature trees that will be dropping leaves onto the roof, but I'm not one to judge. Here's the thing, though: there is a significant difference in the velocity of the water rolling off the roof during a gentle rain and that of the streams pouring off during a torrential downpour.

Not a week after our gutters were installed, we experienced one of the aforementioned downpours. I stepped out onto my stoop to reassure myself that the gutters were equal to the task of handling that volume of water, which they were. Then I looked across the street at the neighbor's house. There was a veritable cataract of water cascading down the roof surface, skipping, for the most part, over the gutter helmets, and producing an impressive drip line in the poor guy's freshly groomed flower beds. He was standing on the stoop, phone in hand, gesticulating wildly at the waterfall and apparently having a loud, boisterous conversation with someone at the other end of the line! Couple days later, the gutter helmet guys were back in his yard, removing the helmets (and presumably refunding his money).

The hack described in the article is almost certainly less expensive than the helmet my neighbor bought, and I'm guessing it would be a lot more effective as well. Perhaps more debris can penetrate the mesh than the sheet aluminium helmet, but by the same token, the greater volume of rainwater captured should wash that debris away more effectively than the smaller volume with a helmet.

That said, it's still a Really Bad Idea to have the roof slope toward the house. Over time, that will cause bigger and bigger problems. Hope the OP can get that fixed soon.

lostlogin• 12 years ago

Longer term - is that roof asbestos? When that gets old just looking at it will shatter it.

lfj• 12 years ago

Interesting write-up about the challenges of tackling this kind of issue when building materials and construction have no standardization that many gutter guard products rely on.

One thing to consider in developed countries is that some products slide under the first row of shingles and may void your roof warranty... then again most of us around here like to do that sort of thing with our projects, albeit with less expensive investments than our houses.

It seems the only real solution is to ensure the product has no real holes or openings, like certain fine mesh products that have holes only microns in size. Again, it seems the real problem here is standardization and it presents an interesting entrepreneurial opportunity.

A programmer trying to fix roof gutter overflow

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