The cheapest part of your exterior, protecting the most expensive part of your house.
Eavestrough is unglamorous and it decides more expensive outcomes than almost anything else on a house. Water that doesn't get carried away from the foundation ends up in the basement, under the driveway, and against the fascia. In Calgary it also freezes, and a gutter full of ice is a gutter being levered off the fascia a millimetre at a time.
There's a second reason we care about gutters more than most roofers: dents on the top face of an eavestrough are among the clearest hail evidence on a property. They are unambiguous, easy to photograph, and hard to argue with. On a hail claim, a dented gutter run corroborates roof damage that's harder to see.
Continuous seamless aluminum eavestrough, formed on site to the exact run length so the only joints are at corners and outlets. Seams are where gutters leak, so fewer seams is the whole design goal. Downspout sizing and placement is matched to the roof area feeding it — an undersized downspout on a large roof overflows in exactly the storm you needed it to work.
Eavestrough hangs off the fascia and tucks under the roof's drip edge, which means the roofer and the gutter installer are working on the same eight inches of building. Done in the wrong order, or by two companies who never spoke, you get gutters removed and rehung badly, drip edge sitting outside the gutter instead of inside it, and water running behind the trough into the fascia. Doing both means the detail is right and there's nobody to blame but us.
Gutters don't cause ice dams — attic heat does. But a full gutter gives the ice somewhere to build, and a heavy ice load tears fasteners out of fascia board. If you're getting dams every winter, the real fix is attic insulation and ventilation; new gutters alone reset the clock on the same problem. We'll tell you that rather than sell you a gutter that won't solve it.
They help on a treed lot and they are not maintenance-free, whatever the marketing says. Fine debris still gets through and needle drop from spruce and pine defeats most designs. On an open prairie lot in Airdrie or Chestermere they're mostly unnecessary. On a canopied Varsity or Elbow Park lot they earn their keep. We'll give you the honest read for your property instead of a blanket recommendation.
It can be part of a claim, and more importantly it's evidence. Dents on the top face of a gutter are one of the clearest indicators that hail of a damaging size hit your property — which supports the roof assessment. If your gutters are dented, your roof was hit, and both belong in the same documented scope.
That's almost always a drip edge problem, not a gutter problem. The roof's drip edge should direct water into the trough; if it's missing, or sitting outside the gutter's back edge, water tracks behind and rots the fascia. It's a common finding on a re-roof done by a crew that didn't think about the gutter.
Once a year on an open lot, twice on a treed one — ideally late autumn after the leaves are down, so they go into winter empty. Going into a Calgary winter with full gutters is how fascia gets damaged.
Yes. It's normal work on its own. We'll still tell you if we see something on the roof while we're up there, which we would rather you heard than didn't.
Drop your name and a way to reach you. We'll follow up with next steps — no pressure, no sales call.
