A gutter is only as good as the board it hangs on
We are fascia and soffit specialists, and we repair gutters because the two cannot be separated: the fascia carries the gutter, and the gutter, when it fails, wets the fascia. A bracket that has pulled out has pulled out because the board behind it is soft. A joint that drips has been dripping down the fascia for months before anyone notices the paint bubbling. So when we come to a gutter we look at what it is fixed to, and when we repair a fascia we make sure the gutter above it is doing its job. That is why our gutter repairs tend to stay repaired.
Why gutters fail in Cambridge
A dry city with a lot of gutter problems. The terraces of Romsey, Petersfield and Mill Road have long shared runs with one outlet at the end, so a single blocked downpipe floods three houses’ fascias. The tree-lined streets — Newnham, De Freville, Storey’s Way, the Hills Road avenues, the riverside in Chesterton — fill every gutter with leaves and seed by November. The concrete tiles on the Arbury and King’s Hedges estates shed moss into the runs. And the fen winters freeze standing water in a gutter that has lost its fall, which opens the joints in spring. On a shared terrace run we repair the section that is yours, re-set the fall towards the outlet, and tell you if the real problem is a neighbour’s blocked downpipe.
What we fix
- Leaking joints and corners — perished seals replaced, and the run re-set on the right number of brackets so the seals are not dragged by expansion.
- Sagging runs and the wrong fall — brackets re-spaced and the run re-levelled towards the outlet, so water does not pond at the low point and overflow.
- Blocked outlets and downpipes — cleared, and the outlet or hopper refitted with a leaf guard where it keeps blocking.
- Broken and missing brackets — replaced, and fixed into sound timber. Where the fascia has gone soft we repair the board first.
- Cracked and split gutters — sections replaced with matching profile; old gutter profiles that are no longer made are adapted with the correct union.
- Downpipes — leaking joints, loose clips, missing shoes, and pipes that discharge against the wall rather than into the drain.
- Gutters overshooting — the tile overhang and gutter position corrected so water off the roof actually lands in the gutter, usually the real cause of "my gutter overflows every time it rains".
- Full replacement — new guttering in uPVC, aluminium or cast-iron-effect, set to fall, with outlets placed for the drains.
Why gutters fail around here
East Anglia is dry by British standards, but it rains hard when it rains, and the flat, open country means the wind drives it. Gutters fitted on the post-war estates around Peterborough, Milton Keynes, Basildon and Haverhill are now forty to sixty years old and their seals were never meant to last that long. Add the moss that comes off concrete tiles, the leaves from the mature gardens of Cambridge and Norwich, and the fenland winters that freeze standing water in a ponding gutter, and a run that was "fine" starts overflowing at the corner — down the fascia, into the soffit, and eventually into the wall below.
Gutter and fascia together
Most of the gutter calls we get across the region turn out to be roofline calls. The gutter has dropped because the fascia is rotten; the fascia is rotten because the gutter has been dripping on it. Fixing one without the other does not last. On a survey we probe the fascia behind the gutter along its whole length and give you a quote that separates the two: what the gutter needs, what the board needs, and what it costs to do both at once — which is always less than two visits. Where the boards are past repair, new guttering is included in a full fascia and soffit replacement.
Gutter repairs across East Anglia
We repair and replace guttering throughout Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire — Cambridge, Peterborough, Ely, Huntingdon and St Neots; Norwich, King's Lynn and Great Yarmouth; Ipswich, Bury St Edmunds, Lowestoft and Newmarket; Colchester, Chelmsford, Braintree and Southend; Bedford, Luton and Dunstable; Northampton, Kettering and Wellingborough; Milton Keynes, Aylesbury and High Wycombe. For a leak, send a photograph of the gutter from the ground and one of the fascia below it with your postcode; we can usually price it from that.
