Gutter guards in St. Louis

The honest version

Guards keep large debris out of the gutter and cut cleaning from twice a year to a rinse. They do not make a gutter maintenance-free, and the one sold at your kitchen table for $30 a foot is not four times better than a good stainless micro-mesh at $10. What decides it in St. Louis is what your trees drop.

• Sycamore is the big one here. Huge leaves in October that mat over any screen, plus bark and seed balls through the winter. Micro-mesh or a wide-perforation screen both handle the leaves; the seed balls sit on top of anything and blow off eventually.
• Pin oak and white oak drop leaves late — often into December — and then acorns and caps. Oaks in Kirkwood and Webster Groves are the reason we get calls in January. Micro-mesh is the only guard that keeps the small stuff out.
• Silver maple drops helicopters in May by the thousand. They slide through screens and lodge in downspouts. Micro-mesh stops them; screens don't.
• Sweetgum balls sit on a reverse-curve guard and roll into the gutter behind a screen. Micro-mesh handles them.
• Cottonwood and elm along the river bottoms drop fluff and small leaves that a screen passes. Again, mesh.

The three types we install

Stainless micro-mesh (about $10–$18 per foot installed): fine stainless screen on an aluminum frame, screwed to the front lip and tucked under the first shingle course, sloped with the roof so water doesn't sheet over it. Handles helicopters, acorn caps and oak leaves, and sheds a two-inch-an-hour storm if it's installed at pitch. Our default under any mature tree. We cover how mesh actually behaves through a St. Louis storm season in what gutter guards are worth it under St. Louis trees.

Aluminum screen (about $5–$9 per foot): a perforated or expanded-metal panel. Cheap, keeps sycamore and oak leaves out, lets helicopters and acorn caps through. Fine on a street of big-leaf trees; not under maples.

Reverse-curve (about $18–$30 per foot): the solid hood that water follows around a lip. Works in a steady rain, overshoots in a Missouri downpour, and holds a film of ice on the nose in January that can back water under the shingles. We install it if you specifically want it. It's rarely our pick here.

Guards and ice

This matters in St. Louis in a way it doesn't in Dallas. A guard doesn't cause an ice dam — poor attic insulation does — but a solid or fine guard on a north-facing eave will grow icicles off its edge, and a gutter under it that's holding water because it lost its pitch will freeze solid. We won't put guards on a run that doesn't drain. We reset the pitch first, or fold the guards into a replacement, where they're cheapest.

Guards on old gutters

Leaf guard gutters St. Louis homeowners get pitched door-to-door are often fitted straight onto twenty-five-year-old sagging aluminum. That seals in the problem. If the gutters leak, sag or are undersized, that gets fixed first — see gutter repair. A guard can't fix a 2x3 downspout on a 50-foot run; it just overflows with clean water instead of leaves.

What to expect afterwards

Under oaks and sycamores, plan on a broom or a leaf-blower pass along the top of the mesh once a year after the leaves are down, usually the first dry week of December. That replaces two full cleanings a year, which is where the money comes back — about year six or seven on a heavily treed lot compared with paying for gutter cleaning twice a year, and never on a lot with two young ornamentals.

The sales pitch you'll hear elsewhere

A two-hour kitchen-table presentation, a "never clean your gutters again" guarantee, and a price that falls by half when you hesitate. The product behind it is usually a decent guard at three times the price. Ask for the price per foot, whether the mesh is stainless or polymer, how it attaches (to the gutter lip, not nailed through the shingles), and what the guarantee actually covers in writing. Then get a plain quote from one of the ordinary gutter contractors St. Louis has plenty of. Gutter guards St. Louis-wide should be a line on a gutter estimate, not a reason to sign something tonight.