The screen test / gutter guards examined by the people who fit them Keys Roofing, St. Louis
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Examination no. 05 / local conditions

Maple Seed, Oak Catkins and the Spring Load

Gutter guard marketing is written about autumn. In these neighbourhoods autumn is the easy half of the year.

Why autumn is the easy case

Leaf fall is the image the whole category sells against, and it is the load a guard handles best. Autumn leaves are large, they mostly arrive dry, and a dry leaf on a screen behaves well: it sits on the surface, it does not conform to the openings, and the next dry windy day takes a good proportion of it off the roof entirely.

Even where leaves do stay put, they stay put as a layer. A layer can be brushed off. It does not become part of the guard.

Why spring is the hard case here

From late March into May, the mature tree cover in the older parts of this metro unloads three things at once, and all three are the wrong size and the wrong shape for a screen.

Maple samarasThe winged seeds, which arrive in enormous numbers and are stiff, thin and pointed. A samara does not sit flat on a screen, it lands nose down and threads into whatever opening it finds. On a coarse screen it goes half through and jams. In a brush insert it weaves into the bristles and will not shake out. In a fine mesh it lies across the weave and mats with the next thousand of them.
Oak catkinsThe long stringy flower tassels that drop in a short, dense window. Catkins are the single most awkward thing a gutter guard in this town has to deal with. They are exactly the shape to lie across an opening rather than fall through it or blow off it, they tangle together into a felt, and wet felt holds water against a screen instead of letting it pass.
Pollen and fine gritA yellow film on everything horizontal for weeks. On its own it is nothing. Combined with samaras and catkins it acts as the binder that turns loose debris into a mat, and a mat is the thing that actually stops water.

What you will be told

The mesh is fine enough that nothing gets through, so you are covered.

What happens on the roof

Getting through is not the failure being sold against here. Staying on is.

Spring debris in St. Louis does not need to get into the gutter to stop it working. It needs only to stay on top of the screen, in a wet mat, for the three weeks in which the heaviest rain of the year arrives. Water then runs down the outside of a perfectly clean gutter.

Fine is good against needles and seed passing through. Fine is also what lets a catkin mat bridge and hold. There is no aperture that solves both, which is why any honest guard conversation ends in a maintenance interval rather than a promise.

Low view across a weathered brown and tan shingle roof with an aluminium telescoping pole across the foreground and a dark mesh gutter guard along the gutter at the right edge, holding brown leaf litter on its upper surface
Plate 7 · Litter sitting on the mesh rather than in the trough. In autumn that layer is loose and a windy afternoon moves most of it. Replace it with wet catkins in April and it becomes a continuous felt that stays where it is until somebody puts a brush on it.

The two weeks that actually matter

If you own guards in this metro, the single most valuable habit is to look at them in the first week of May, from the ground, with the sun behind you, ideally while it is raining.

  • Water coming off the front edge in a steady sheet while the gutter behind it is not running means the screen is bridged, not blocked. That is a brushing job, not a product failure.
  • A dark continuous line along the top of the guard where there used to be metal or mesh colour is a mat that has been there long enough to hold moisture.
  • Seedlings. Maple germinates readily in anything damp. A row of small green shoots along a gutter line is a reliable indicator that the surface has been permanently wet for weeks.
  • Nothing visible at all is not proof of anything on a fine mesh, because the material that blinds a micro-mesh is too small to see from the ground. That check is done with a hand on the mesh, on a ladder, by somebody who is comfortable up there.

What this means for choosing

Under heavy maple and oak, which describes a large share of the older housing here, the realistic choice is between a fine screen that will need brushing in spring and a coarser one that will let fine material into a trough that will need rinsing. Both are maintenance. Anyone offering a third option where neither happens is describing a house with no trees over it.

The seasonal counterpart to this page is what a Missouri winter does to the fixing, and the practical version is what living with guards looks like.

Keep going

Read nextIce load and the guard that liftsRelatedLiving with guards afterwards

The spring load

If it went wrong in April, that is the useful detail

A guard that copes all winter and overflows in the first warm week is telling you something specific about its aperture, and it is worth saying which month it happened in.

Keys Roofing works on gutters year round in greater St. Louis and can tell you what is on the mesh before deciding what to do about it.

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