I wonder how they would hold-up in winter - with about 50 pounds of ice clinging ... or how nice they look after a few months-worth of filthy gutter goop washes over them after a dry spell... For me - changing it over in spring and fall, and cleaning & maintaining it would be far more trouble than a normal downspout. John T.
I've got one on an outbuilding with wide overhangs. I don't worry that much about where the water goes. It dumps out onto a big decorative rock at the bottom, which is slightly angled away from the building. You could use a splashblock, I suppose.
The water doesn't always drop neatly down the chain; there's a fair amount of splashing.
It withstands winter ice (Michigan), but my husband took pretty good measures to ensure that the attachment point was robust.
It services a very short run of gutter, which has a leaf excluder of some sort of on it, so it doesn't get much gunk coming down the chain.
I'm pretty satisfied with it in its current location, but I doubt I'd put it on my house, which has no overhang or soffit.
Incidentally, my husband fabricated a sort of snorkel for the leaf blower, which we use to clean the gutters and downspouts on our single-story house.
I have to clear gutters but not the downspout. This thing might make gutter clog more easily as chain has to hang through it leaving debris to clog smaller opening.
Can you take a picture and publish a link? I went up on the roof yesterday with a cordless leaf blower and attempted to blow leaves out of the gutter. I imagine it might work on dry leaves, but was ineffective on wet maple leaves.
I have a much more powerful corded leaf blower, but the end is too big to get into the gutter.
Looking back at it to see how big the funnel part was and noticing cost of a 3 foot section, the biggest impediment to me buying it would be my cash flow.
I'd like to hear more about that too. I'm gettin' too old to hang on a ladder digging leaves out of the gutter.
Costco had a demo of some that used surface tension to route the water around a curve in the top section into the trough. Works great with low water volume and no debris. What happens when it's raining like hell and there's more water than surface tension can wrap around the edge?
The type that's just a screen seems like it would plug up with leaves too. I've got tiny pine needles and huge maple leaves.
Which kind do you have? How well do they work in a downpour?
It might take a few days. Meanwhile, I'll describe it.
The current one is schedule 80 PVC. The predecessor was schedule 40.
I'm pretty sure it's 4" at the point where it joins the leaf blower and has a reducing union somewhere to increase the pressure at the outlet.
The top is made of elbows and is un-cemented so he can twist it around as needed for horizontal flow or remove one for vertical flow to blow down the downspout.
The really tricky part was softening the PVC and working it so that it slots right in to the connector on the leaf blower. I can't remember if he used a heat gun or the gas grill.
Now, I'm off to work. Got to earn the money to pay for his toys. That's fair. He pays for everything else. (Actually, we have complete join finances and it's impossible to know which paycheck the money came from.)
We use them too, but the quantity of mature maples around our house requires us to blow the leaves (and in the spring, the spinners) off the top of the gutter guards. They make it easy, though.
....which are typically made of plastic! Plastic that rots and falls apart under UV light (sun). I'm still picking up old plastic 'gutter guard' pieces off my deck. 8|
There are two styles of this brand. One is intended for new work; the other is meant to be installed when the gutters are already hung. We've only used the former.
I've never had to clean a downspout of debris. It's always the gutters that get clogged with leaves and the opening at the top of the downspout. Seems to me you'd have the same problem with a chain, maybe worse, because the opening would have the chain in the middle of it. So, I'm not sure what exactly the point is to a chain, except as a novelty thing to look at.
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