Gutter Guards

 When the new roof and solar system was installed, they also took down the old gutters and put up new ones.  But the crud that was in the French drain re-enforced the concept of putting screens over the gutters to keep out leaves and twigs.  I think I've already put them on the sections of the roof that run along both sides of the garage.  I don't think we need them on the gutter in the back -- it gets very little in terms of leaves and in any case just runs out into the yard.  We don't have gutters along the West side of the house.  So that just leaves the front gutter.

We found the cheapest gutter guards available, from Home Depot, consisting of 3 foot sections of plastic screens.

We slid them under the last row of shingles and push them onto the front edge of the gutter.

Until we had them covering the entire front gutter.

Update. 9 Sept 2024.  When we were putting up these cheap plastic gutter guards, Michael (our neighbor from across the cove) came over and offered me a pack (well, a partial pack) of Easy On Gutter Guards from Costco.  These are stainless steel mesh gutter guards. $10 apiece, instead of $1.54 for the plastic ones.  But 4 foot long instead of the 3 foot plastic ones.

The one pack was enough to redo the gutter on the East side of the garage.  This gutter gets a lot of leaves and such from the Crepe Myrtle trees and the Chinese Pistache tree.

First, we remove the current plastic screens.

 The stainless steel screens are much stronger.  They slide in under the shingles easily and then are held in place with either tape 

or screws.  We used the tape to put them in place and then used screws, just to be sure. We use a #8 x 3/8 sheet metal screw, but since we only had 12 in the package, we then ended up with only two per screen (the instructions suggested 3 per screen).

We can evaluate if they work that much better, to justify the cost.