Last night, our current guest sent me a video of the local waterwall during heavy rain. I popped over to visit straight away, but by then the heavy rain had ceased and there was no waterfall.
This clip shows how useful photo's and video can be for us to help out our guests when they let us know there's an issue. The cottage is part of a small terrace of three cottages with a shared gutter system. A blockage in one part can effect others. Weather permitting, I'll pop over with the gutter vacuum system today to clean our gutters and the neighbouring ones. We have a 3.6 kW Predator with 32ft (10 metres) of poles to do that job safely with the busy road (B5023) outside of the cottages. Ladders are difficult due to the slope of the road and the danger from traffic.
We purchased the system to deal with the gutters on our own Georgian house whose gutters regularly fill with autumn leaves and pine needles from nearby trees. We have a busy road outside, with sloping paths at the back of the property, which means ladders are best avoided. Some of the gutters are difficult to reach safely via ladders. We also have a pole camera system to allow us to inspect the gutters, before and after cleaning, from the ground. We found that it can be difficult to quickly obtain the services of a gutter cleaning company at short notice during stormy periods in the Autumn. We've used our system to maintain the gutters on a council owned local community centre situated on the edge of woodland.
Here, the morning following the "Waterfall", I was busy cleaning the gutters for the entire block of three terraced cottages, about 30 metres of gutter. The work took about two hours including setting up, vacuuming and then cleaning up after. Before starting work vacuuming, I took a video of the gutters. It turns out there were no blockages on our section of the gutter, but there were two in the neighbours' gutter system. The blockage was mostly cement debris from the roof tilings,some decaying leaves and a couple of rooted weed patches. Outside on the roadside pavement I'd laid out five traffic cones at the road edge to warn drivers of work in progress. During thirty minutes of working that section, two of the warning cones were knocked over by road traffic, but generally most drivers were considerate. I hate to think of what might have happened if I had been on an unprotected ladder.
