The Gutter Cleaning Tool?
I am glad you asked. This gutter cleaning tool is one of the newest tools to hit the market. After years of messing around and prototyping it, we finally decided to get it on the market. I have purchased and or used all of the available tools for cleaning gutters that are currently on the market. I always found myself looking for ways to modify them to suit a particular need I wanted on a given day.
I own a roof cleaning company and we clean a lot of gutters in the falls and winter. We have cleaned thousands of gutters over the last 11 years and believe me, anything that makes it quicker, easier and more efficient is something I want in my toolbox. Having a tinkerers mindset, I am always looking at ways to make things that would make gutter cleaning easier. There are a few gutter cleaning tools out that attach to poles and I have used and modified most of them. After a bunch of modifications and prototypes we came up with the Gutter Cleaning Tool.
Mind you, I am still working on an attachments for it but I think you will find that it will really make cleaning gutters a lot easier.
Making gutter cleaning easier
The whole idea behind this gutter tool was to make our job of cleaning out gutters easier. Removing debris from a packed gutter is a messy job and doing it on an extension ladder takes a good amount of energy. Doing it all day every day is pretty tiring. Using a pole that extends 8 to 12 feet and our gutter tool allows you to clean 20 feet of gutter at a time before you need to move your ladder. It also saves you two or three ladder moves. If your are working on the gutters of a two story house and using a standard 28 foot extension ladder, that is 2 or 3 times up and down plus moving it. Now do the math on a whole house and you can see the significant amount of up and downs you are saving, not to mention all the ladder moving.
But you can’t just stand on a ladder and try to clean out 10 feet of gutter in each direction if it is not quicker than moving the ladders in the first place. That is what I was finding with some of these tools I was using. The biggest problem anyone faces when cleaning out a dirty gutter with any type of tool or device is the gutter hangars. (insert pic) These nails essentially hold the gutters to the fascia and they are a pain to work debris around. It was for this reason that I ended up coming up with our tool. It is not the be-all-end-all tool for gutter cleaning but I will say it is the handiest tool I use and we do not clean gutters without it.
Let’s take a look at this new gutter cleaning tool
First, we have the curved scraper which you use to pull debris in the gutter towards you. We also use to “flip” debris out when the gutters are really full before we start pulling it towards us.. It took a couple of attempts to get the angle and length of this part of the tool down to where it works most efficiently. The hangars and gutter sizes vary in width and height. You can use the tool to pull debris to you or, if the gutter is really full, you can first flip a bunch of debris out and then pull the rest to you. There should be a good demonstration video on our video page.
The Push/Pull Stick
Using a pole and spoon type scraper is what all the existing tools on the market do as well, but they all pose the same problem of getting around the gutter hangars quickly and efficiently. You have to dig a few times to get it through each hangar and the further away the debris, the harder it is to get it through the hangar. So I looked to improve my gutter tool and came up with what we call the push/pull stick. Pretty technical name right?
The push pull stick is the angled stick attached to the back of the tool. It serves a few purposes. The first is that you can pull debris with the scraper until a gutter hangar blocks you, then you simply flip the tool over and pull the debris under the gutter hangar. Repeat at the next hangar until you get the debris within reach.
It also acts a hook so you can hang the tool over your ladder. That way you will have both hands available when going up and down the ladder.
The last thing the push/pull stick is good for is that you can reach behind structures on the roof to pull off piled up debris. I find it particularly useful for cleaning off the area behind the top of skylights. The spoon type gutter tools can’t do this, and it is a big part of cleaning gutters for us as a company. You can also use it to pull debris out of roof valleys.
When my company is contracted to clean out customer gutters, we don’t just clean out gutters. We also want to remove all major debris from the roof and valleys. The gutter tool helps us do it safely from a ladder on roofs with steep pitches.