Shared guttering

[Semidetached owner]

Hi all, I live in a semi detached house. Currently our guttering is full and in need of clearing and cleaning, I’ve booked someone to come and sort that already. This sadly has been causing problem to our neighbour. Our roof is on a deeper incline than his apparently, and water has been leaking his side, we haven’t noticed it or suffered from it. He recently had his guttering cleaned and I think that’s when he noticed it. We don’t get on with these neighbours sadly, they are quite abusive and difficult. Anyway, he wants us to pay for beeding to separate our gutterings. Anyone heard of this? Shouldn’t this be a joint cost? I’m happy to clean my guttering etc, but don’t want to be paying for more than we should, as this particular neighbour rejoices in making life tricky for us and anyway he could get one up on us he would. He’s been incredibly unkind to my heavily pregnant wife regarding this matter snd other than doing our bit, I don’t want to do him any favours either. Thanks oh s fir any help you may be able to offer.

[Tricky Dicky]

A lot will depend on where the downspouts are as to each neighbours responsibility and also what you can do to separate the the two sections. To separate yours you would have to have a downspout on your property and a gully for it and the guttering would have to be sloped towards the downspout.

If there is only one downspout either in the middle between the houses or at one end then technically the whole system is shared, a broken downspout becomes the joint responsibility however a repair to either guttering could be deemed that that owner had done his/her share of the issue.

If the downspout was at one end again responsibility would be shared and the neighbour with the downspout cannot prevent the other neighbours rainwater from leaving the gutters down the pipe. We had a system such as that when we moved into our present bungalow which was linked- detached by my neighbours car port. One side of my roof drained onto his carport which then sloped down to a gutter at the front of the carport draining via a downspout and gully on my neighbours side of his driveway. The responsibility was written into the deeds as a covenant.

Fortunately our neighbour is an accommodating young man with whom we get on. When we replaced our roof he decided that his carport which was badly in need of repair was not worth it and he removed it. This enabled us to gutter that side of the roof however the downspout had to be piped across his drive to the original gully which he was quite happy to have done.

Richard

[Vir Campestris]

I missed the original post.

It seems to me that if the neighbour recently had his gutters cleaned, and now there is a leak, there might be a connection between these two events.

Or in simpler terms the cleaners broke the gutter.

Andy