Gutter Installation Sized For Chicago Rain

Rolled On Site, Not Cut From Stock Lengths

A coil of aluminum goes into a forming machine on our trailer, and the machine rolls out one continuous piece the full length of your eave. A 42 foot run comes off as one 42 foot gutter. The only joints on the whole house are at the corners and the outlets, and those we seal and rivet by hand.

Sectional gutter, the kind sold in ten foot sticks at the box store, puts a lap joint every ten feet. Aluminum moves roughly an eighth of an inch per ten feet between a January morning and a July afternoon here, and it moves at every one of those seams. Sealant survives that a few years. Then it does not, and you get the drip line that stains the siding under the joint. Rolling the run on site removes the problem instead of sealing around it.

Color goes on at the coil, baked enamel over aluminum, so there is no painting and no chalking after two seasons. Around Alsip that usually means white, almond or a brown that plays with brick. On newer builds out in Naperville it is more often black or bronze to line up with the window frames.

Five Inch Versus Six Inch, And Why It Matters Here

Most houses in the south suburbs came with five inch K-style gutter, and on a small ranch with a shallow pitch it is genuinely enough. It stops being enough fast. A six inch gutter does not hold twenty percent more water, it holds closer to forty percent more, because the cross section grows in both directions. Pair that with a three by four inch downspout instead of the old two by three and you have roughly double the drainage capacity of a standard setup.

Here is what pushes a house to six inch in our climate:

• Steep roof pitch. Water coming off an 8/12 or 10/12 slope arrives fast and shoots past the front lip of a narrow gutter instead of dropping into it.
• Large roof planes. One long unbroken slope dumping into a single run needs more channel than four small planes splitting the same square footage.
• Valleys emptying onto a short section of eave. A valley concentrates two slopes into one point, and a five inch gutter under one overflows in every heavy rain no matter how clean it is.
• Any history of water in the basement. If the foundation is already the weak link, we are not handing you the smallest gutter that technically passes.

Chicagoland gets its rain in bursts, and a five inch gutter on a steep roof will overshoot during the first ten minutes of a real summer thunderstorm, which is exactly the ten minutes that matter. We size for the burst, not for the average.

Downspout Count And Placement

The gutter is a holding tank. The downspouts are the drain. Undersize the drain and the tank overflows no matter how big it is. Rule of thumb we work from: one downspout for roughly every 30 to 35 feet of run, more if the run is fed by a valley, and never fewer than two on any elevation long enough to need them.

Pitch: The Quarter Inch That Does All The Work

Hidden hangers screwed into the fascia every 24 inches hold the run. Not spikes and ferrules, which were fine in 1970 and work loose every time the wood expands. Not 36 inch spacing, which is what you use when you are trying to make a number work. Snow load in this area is the reason for 24 inches, and it is the reason a gutter full of ice in February either holds or peels off the house.

Why We Want To See Your Drip Edge First

Here is the piece almost nobody mentions. The gutter does not attach to the roof, it attaches under it, and where those two systems meet is where installs go wrong. Drip edge is the L-shaped metal flashing along the eave that carries water off the deck edge and out over the gutter lip.

So before we hang anything we look at the eave. If the drip edge is right, we hang to it. If it is missing or damaged, we say so and price the correction. That is also why gutters and roofs belong in the same conversation: one crew sets the drip edge, the ice and water shield and the gutter in the right order, with no gap between two contractors pointing at each other. If a shingle roof replacement is already on your list, put the gutters in the same job.

Guards And Screens: The Honest Version

We install guards. We also tell people the truth about them, which is that no guard on the market makes a gutter maintenance free. The good ones cut cleaning from twice a year to once every few years. The bad ones trap shingle grit and maple seeds into a mat on top of the guard and cost you more than bare gutter would have.

Under mature silver maples and cottonwoods, which the older south suburban blocks are full of, a fine micro-mesh guard on a properly pitched six inch gutter genuinely works. Under pine, where needles thread into any mesh, results are worse and we will say so upfront. Foam inserts we do not sell at all. They wick water, hold debris and turn into a planter within three years. Ask us on the contact page what we would put on our own house and you will get the version we would give a neighbor.

What The Job Looks Like

Most single-family gutter installs run one day. We show up with the coil trailer, pull the old runs if there are any, look at the fascia, chalk the pitch, roll and hang the runs, cut and mount the downspouts, then flush every run with a hose while you watch. That last part is not for show. Water finds a low spot faster than a level does, and if a run holds anywhere we adjust hangers before we pack the trailer.

Angelo supervises the work the way his father Frank ran jobs: the owner is on site, not on the phone. Old aluminum leaves in our trailer for recycling, and the ground gets swept before we go. Finished work is in the gallery if you want to see runs and corner miters up close. We install gutters weekly around Blue Island and Frankfort, and satellite measurements let us give you a straight price on the phone before anybody drives out.