Gutter Cleaning in Manly

Two things fill a Manly gutter, and neither behaves like ordinary leaf litter.

The first is Norfolk Island pine. The needles are fine and shed almost year round rather than in a seasonal drop, and because they are small they travel to the low point of a run and pack tightly instead of sitting loose. The second is windblown sand off the ocean beach, carrying salt with it. Sand and needle bind into a dense, gritty mat that sets in the base of the gutter, and flushing simply runs water over the top of it.

Manly's exposure is unusual in that it faces both the ocean and the harbour, so there is no sheltered aspect where this does not happen.

The building stock decides the access. The art deco and interwar walk-ups through the middle of the suburb carry box gutters behind parapets, draining through a few outlets, where a blockage ponds rather than overflows and finds its way into a top-floor unit. The Federation and interwar semis have conventional eaves gutters, but they sit on narrow, steep streets where there is often nowhere to stand a ladder at all.

We vacuum from ground level, clear downpipes, and check outlet flow on the parapet buildings.

In most suburbs a gutter fails because it blocks. In Manly it also fails because of what is sitting in it.

Salt-laden sand packed permanently into the base of a gutter holds moisture against the metal continuously, and that is how a gutter run which should last decades starts perforating early. Replacing guttering around a whole house is a significant job, and on a heritage property in a conservation area the profile has to be matched.

The blockage consequences are sharper here too. On the walk-ups, a ponding box gutter behind a parapet has no safe failure mode, and the water finds the membrane above someone's ceiling. For an owners corporation that means an insurance claim, a make-good and a dispute about whether maintenance was reasonable.

On the semis, overflow soaks painted timber fascia and eaves that are original on a lot of these houses, and rotted heritage timber is not a like-for-like replacement from a hardware store.

Because we vacuum rather than flush, the salted sand actually leaves the gutter instead of being pushed toward the downpipe, and nothing rests against a century-old fascia on a narrow street.