The Cheapest Repair on the Building, Ignored the Longest
Nobody thinks about gutters. They are not visible from inside, they cost little to maintain, and when they fail they do it quietly.
What they do when they fail is expensive. Water that should be carried away from the building instead runs down a wall, pools at the foundation, or backs up behind a fascia board and enters at the wall plate. Months of that produces penetrating damp, rotted fascias and barge boards, saturated foundations, and ceiling stains that everybody assumes are the roof.
We are regularly called out for a damp wall or a ceiling leak, and the fault is a gutter. It costs a fraction of what the damp treatment would have cost, and the customer has usually already paid someone else for the damp treatment.
What Gutters Have to Handle Here
Cape Town does not get a lot of rain days. It gets a lot of rain in a small number of days.
Roughly 70% of the annual total falls between June and September, and it arrives on cold fronts that deliver a large volume in a few hours rather than a steady drizzle over a day. June averages somewhere between 85 and 130mm depending on the station. February is under 20mm.
That pattern makes capacity the governing factor rather than durability. A gutter and downpipe system sized for average rainfall will overflow under a front, and overflow is where the damage happens. It also means a partial blockage that would be harmless elsewhere is not harmless here, because the system has no spare capacity when it matters.
Add the coastal element. Salt air corrodes metal gutters, fixings and brackets, particularly on the Atlantic Seaboard and the West Coast side. And the summer south-easter fills gutters with leaves, sand and debris through the dry months, so they enter winter already partly blocked.
What We Do
Gutter cleaning. Clearing gutters, downpipes and valleys before the winter rain window, plus a proper look at what the debris was hiding.
Gutter installation. New systems sized for the roof area and the local rainfall intensity, in seamless aluminium or other profiles.
Gutter repairs. Sagging runs, failed joints, corroded sections, brackets, downpipes and fascia damage.
Each of those is set out in full on its own page.
