These cheap plastic gutter guards do the trick, even with an old dented gutter system like mine.

The roof and gutters on my home are a little over ten years old, so it’s going to be time to have a new roof put on and all the gutters replaced in another year or two. In the meantime, however, I’ve found that because I have a tree in front of my house my rain gutters tend to get clogged in a matter of weeks during the summer and fall months. Even with the plastic and then the metal mesh, I was still cleaning out my gutters almost once a month. That was just too much.

I don’t have the money for those super expensive gutter guard systems you see advertised in the local paper, so I climbed up on my roof last year and decided to try something different. Instead of the usual mesh, I went to my local big box hardware store and found some solid plastic gutter shields with rain holes on one side. They simply snap over your gutters and keep just about everything out of your gutter except for rainwater flowing down your roof.

They ran for about $1.00 a foot and I figured I needed about 50 feet or so to cover all my front gutters. I decided to give them a try and bought just 12 feet of guards (three guards at four feet a piece) and installed them in the gutter line over my garage. I wasn’t expecting much for the price, but I was pleasantly surprised.

They worked like a charm! During very heavy rain some of the water tends to roll over the holes and right off the roof, but that happens with almost gutters no matter how much they cost.

They’re not quite seemless, but when you stand from the road they really look pretty good. And for $1.00 a foot compared to the “professional gutter guard” pricing of around $20 a foot, I wasn’t going to complain!

I used them on the rest of the roof last fall and rarely had a problem with them until today. I came home and found one of the guards from over the garage had blown off and was sitting in my front yard. I grabbed the guard and climbed up the ladder to see why. Again, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my gutters were still clear and that the guard had probably blown off because I had accidentally dented the gutters a couple times around Christmastime trying to put up the lights.

For the moment I just banged out a few of the larger dents and snapped my cheap plastic rain gutter guard back into place. Is it perfect? Far from it! Does it look okay and will it prevent me from climbing on the roof every few weeks until I can have all my gutters replaced? You bet!