Fargo Gutters, Roofing, and the Exterior Work Between Them

Nine times out of ten the gutter itself is fine and the downspout is not. Cottonwood fluff and box elder seed pack into the elbow at the bottom of the downspout, and once that elbow is full the water has nowhere to go but over the front edge. We check every downspout to the ground before we blame the gutter.

If you have a mature tree anywhere near the house, yes. Fargo does not have the leaf volume of a place with oaks and maples on every lot, but cottonwood fluff and box elder seed clog a gutter just as fast, and they do it in June, not October, when nobody is thinking about cleaning gutters.

The mechanism is the same everywhere, heat escaping into the attic melts snow on the upper roof and it refreezes at the cold eave, but our thaw cycles are sharper. A week of hard cold followed by a sudden warm spell moves a lot of water fast, and an attic that was fine in a normal winter can build a dam in that one stretch.

The biggest failure point on any gutter is the seam, and a formed seamless run only has seams at the corners and the end caps instead of every ten feet. Fewer seams means fewer places for ice to grab and split the metal, which matters here more than in a climate that never freezes.

Water at the fascia line during a rain is usually the gutter. Water inside the house, especially after a thaw rather than a rainstorm, is almost always the roof or the attic ventilation behind it. We look at both before we tell you which one to fix first.