Help Me! My Basement is Flooding!

Last year we had many heavy rains that caused basements to flood. In the last few years basement flooding has become an epidemic. When we get torrential rains it results in many desperate calls to our office. Usually, it involves an overflowing eavestrough and/or a downpipe routed into a clay pipe which goes into the city storm sewers. These homeowners suffer incredible agony having to get all the water out of the basement and take up wet carpets and furniture.

This kind of incident serves as a sober reminder to home owners to keep up with the maintenance of critical things like eavestroughs and grading around the home. As winter winds down and we head into spring, here are a few maintenance items to keep you from being one of these unfortunate home owners.

CLEAN YOUR EAVESTROUGH
Every year I get calls from customers who state that water is gushing over the side of their eavestroughs and flooding their home. When I arrive, I find the eavestroughs and or downspouts plugged solid with leaves. Remember, if you or your neighbours have large trees and they are 50-100 feet away from your house, DEBRIS IS GETTING INTO YOUR EAVESTROUGH. If you have  don't have gutter protection, you must clean them 2 or 3 times a year. It takes a small amount of leaves to plug the top of a downspout. Having no eavestrough protection WILL increase your maintenance. Since you are not able to see in the eavestrough, you will never know it your eavestrough is plugged or not! When heavy rains maximize the capacity of your eavestrough system, a small amount of debris can plug things up and cause a major overflow.

To avoid potential disaster, your eavestrough should be inspected regularly, especially if you have no gutter protection. You do not want to find out your eavestroughs are completely clogged when that midnight thunder and rainstorm comes through and dumps water directly into a window well and you wake up to a basement full of water!

CONSIDER GETTING GUTTER PROTECTION
With the quality gutter protections available on the market today, there is no need to have to clean your eavestough or have to worry about if they are clogged or not. There are MANY good products on the market and they work. However, you have to be selective and careful when considering gutter protection. Cheaper is not always better and I have never seen anything at a DIY store that works well.

On the other hand, many gutter protection companies want to sell you on their product. They say it is the one and only, the best, with a lifetime warranty.....blah, blah, blah. Then, after they do their sales pitch they roll out the price. Sometimes the price can be $20 to $30 per ft! That is a usurious amount of money to pay for gutter protection! It's almost criminal what some companies charge.

I sell two main products. I sell them because they work. The best product I sell is Diamond Back Gutter Covers and it sells for about $10-12 per ft installed on a house with a normal pitched roof. The other product is Alu-Rex and I it sells for about $5 per ft. You can find both products on my website at www.theeavestroughcompany.com


REPAIR OR REPLACE YOUR EAVESTROUGH

3. Old poorly sloped eavestroughs can pool lots of water. This results in them getting very heavy, cause the old nails and ferrules to come loose and surrender to gravity. This allows a river of water to run right down the side of your house toward your foundation. I have seen numerous houses with the eavestrough ripped right off! Like the one below.

Make sure this does not happen to you! Get your eavestroughs repaired or replaced if they are old. I generally recommend replacement, especially if the eavestroughs are 20 or more years old. Repairing old eavestrough is usually just not very cost effective as the eavestrough is nearing the end of its life anyway.

FIX THE GRADING AROUND YOUR HOUSE!

Combine a clogged and overflowing eavestrough with grading that slopes directly toward the house and you are asking for trouble! Not only are you getting all the roof water going to this area but the rainwater off the landscaping is all flowing that direction. Sometimes, there is nothing you can do to change the direction of the slope around your house. Below is a picture of my backyard. I back onto the Niagara Escarpment. 75 feet behind my home is a hill 50 feet high! What I did was grade my backyard so that, in heavy rainstorms, the water would run across my yard and down another area well away from me and my neighbors house. Look what happened in one of those torrential downpours we had in recent years!

The grading worked perfectly and it flowed right around the house and into a drain that my neighbor and I built which carried it far away from our houses.

I hope you found this article helpful. It may just help you avoid having disaster strike your basement like the guy below!

For a free estimate on your current eavestrough, call The Eavestrough Company today at 905-966-2564 or visit our website at www.theeavestroughcompany.com