Professional Gutter Cleaning in Burnley

Why Burnley gutters block

Burnley sits in a bowl with the Pennines around it, takes around 1,100mm of rain a year, and gets a good deal of wind off the open ground to the east and north.

The rain carries moss and tile grit down off the roof. The wind brings in debris from the moor, the parks and the fields. Both end up in the same place.

Properties out at Worsthorne, Cliviger, Briercliffe and the exposed edges collect noticeably more than those in the sheltered middle of town.

The silt nobody expects

People picture a gutter full of leaves. What we usually find is a dense black sludge of ground-down moss and grit washed off the tiles, sitting in the bottom of the run.

That silt will not flush through with a hose. Left over a summer it dries and compacts until it is close to mortar, and by then it is holding water permanently against the back of the gutter and the fascia.

Vacuuming lifts it out. Flushing it just moves it into the downpipe, where it does the same job in a narrower space.

Clearing it from the ground

We work from ground level with a high-reach vacuum on carbon poles, up to about three storeys. No ladder is leaned against your guttering and nobody walks on the roof.

Leaning a ladder on plastic guttering is one of the more common causes of the sagging, pulled brackets and failed joints we get asked to look at, so avoiding it is not just a safety point.

It also works on properties with conservatories, extensions and awkward ground where a ladder simply cannot be footed safely.

Camera footage as standard

The pole carries a camera, so you get a recording of the gutter before we start and after we finish.

Gutter cleaning is the one job a customer genuinely cannot inspect. You cannot see into your own gutters, which makes it the easiest job in this trade to half-do. The footage is how you know.

Downpipes and drains

Downpipes are run through to confirm they flow and the gully at the bottom is checked. A clear gutter feeding a blocked downpipe still overflows, it just does it in a different place.

On the older terraces around Burnley Wood, Daneshouse and Rosegrove, underground gullies silt up regularly and produce exactly the symptoms of a blocked gutter: damp at the base of the wall and water standing where it should not.

What it costs you to leave it

Overflow down a wall means damp inside. Water behind the fascia means rotten boards and rafter feet, which is a roofing job rather than a cleaning one.

Frozen standing water splits plastic gutter joints and pulls cast iron off stone. And a gutter full of wet silt is heavy enough to pull its own brackets out over time.

All of it costs more than clearing it would have done.

Shared runs and terraced streets

On the terraced streets through Burnley Wood, Rosegrove and Daneshouse the guttering often runs continuously across several houses with no break at the party wall.

That has a practical consequence: your neighbour blocked gutter is your problem too, because the water backs up along the run and finds the lowest point, which may well be over your door rather than theirs.

It is usually worth a word with the neighbours and getting the whole run done at once. It costs each household less than doing them individually and it actually fixes the problem rather than moving it two doors along.

Frequency and price

Once a year for most Burnley properties, twice if you are exposed, have trees close by, or have a roof carrying a lot of moss. Autumn is the right single visit if you only do one.

If the gutters keep filling with roof moss, the permanent fix is the roof. See roof cleaning in Burnley.

Fixed price in writing before we start, camera footage included. Cheaper combined with the driveway in one visit.