Les Jones

Home Life > More Filthy Gutter Talk

None of the remedies I tried kept the gutters from overflowing during tonight's intense storm. Maybe nothing would. It was hella storm.

Still, I started wondering if I had enough downspouts. I've got six for 150 feet of gutters. Is that enough? I Googled and found that one downspout every 25 to 100 feet is recommended. This page for people building dairy barns goes into lots (lots!) more detail, such as roof pitch, gutter slope, gutter size, downspout diameter, etc. It also has this nifty chart that goes into the thermal expansion of different gutter materials:

Table 1. Coefficient of expansion and expansion/contraction of 100 feet of gutter with 100 degrees of temperature change.

Where I live there's typically only 80 degrees of annual temperature variation. If the gutters were installed on a typical day (60-80 degrees), there'd be a half inch or so of annual variation in each direction on my 75' gutter span.