Guttering in Stirling

Stirling sits on the carse with the Ochils to the north-east and the Touch Hills and Campsies to the west, and weather coming in from the west hits the city’s exposed slate roofs hard. Rain driven at an angle overshoots a shallow gutter, so on exposed elevations we often recommend a deeper profile than the one that came off.

• Deep-flow uPVC or aluminium (115mm to 125mm) for steep slate roofs and the big roof areas on Victorian villas, where a standard 112mm half-round simply cannot take the volume in a downpour.
• Half-round 112mm is fine for the two-storey semis and terraces on the estates, provided the fall is right and there is a downpipe every 10 to 12 metres.
• Cast iron, or cast-iron-effect aluminium in an ogee or half-round profile, for stone buildings where the roofline detail is part of the house. Aluminium gives the same look at roughly half the weight, does not need painting and is much kinder to old sandstone fixings.
• Seamless aluminium for long, exposed runs where the joints are the weak point.

Sizing is not guesswork. We work out the roof area each outlet drains, the pitch and the exposure, and pick a profile that copes with the heaviest rain rather than the average shower. A downpipe should land in a gully feeding a surface-water drain or a soakaway, not onto the path; Scottish Water’s general position is that rainwater should not be added to a combined sewer, so on an older property we work with whatever drainage is already there. The same sizing approach runs through all of our guttering work in Falkirk and the Forth Valley.

Stirling Council looks after a large number of conservation areas, and the Old Town and King’s Park are the ones we work in most. Like-for-like repair of an existing rhone does not normally need any permission. Changing the material or profile on an elevation that can be seen from the street, or doing anything to a listed building, may need planning permission or listed building consent, and the council will usually want to see cast iron or a convincing aluminium equivalent rather than white uPVC on a stone frontage. We tell you before quoting if we think a permission question arises, and we can talk you through the options that keep the look right.

Cast iron itself is worth looking after. Sections that are sound can be taken down, wire-brushed or blasted back, primed and re-hung with new joints and stainless fixings, which is far cheaper than replacing a whole run. Where a length has rusted through, new cast iron is still made in the traditional profiles, and cast-iron-effect aluminium is a sensible alternative on the rear elevations nobody sees.

The honest answer is that it depends where you live. King’s Park, Bridge of Allan and the Riverside have some of the finest mature trees in Central Scotland, and every one of them ends up in somebody’s gutter by December. Houses there need a clear once the leaves are down, every year, and often a second in spring for the seed cases and blossom. On the concrete-tiled estates the enemy is moss rather than leaves: it grows on the shaded slopes, breaks off in wind and rain, and packs the gutter into a sodden mat that does not wash through. A north-facing roof in Cornton or Broomridge can need clearing twice a year with no trees in sight.

Whatever the cause, the warning signs are the same: water pouring over the front edge in rain, grass growing in the gutter, drips at the unions after the rain has stopped, and a tidemark down the wall. We clear by hand and flush the downpipes, and we check the gully at the bottom, because a clean gutter draining into a blocked gully still overflows.

On stone houses especially, a defective gutter announces itself as a dark, permanently wet band of masonry below the eaves, often with green algae on the north side. Inside, it shows as a damp patch in the top corner of an upstairs room or a stain spreading down from the cornice. That is penetrating damp from above. It gets misdiagnosed as rising damp surprisingly often, but rising damp does not reach first-floor ceilings; it stays within about a metre of the ground. Fixing the rhone stops the supply of water, and the wall will then dry out over a season, though on thick stone that can take months.

If you already have staining inside, our damp and water ingress service in Stirling traces the route before anyone replasters. Our advice article on why blocked and leaking gutters cause damp covers the warning signs in more detail, and the roofline cost guide sets out what replacement tends to cost.

A lot of Stirling housing is three storeys, and a good deal of it stands on a slope, which rules out ladders for anything more than a look. We use a mobile tower where the ground allows and scaffold where it does not, and we price the access on the quote so there are no surprises. We do not expect you to go up a ladder to check anything for us. While we are up, we look at the slates, the lead and the chimney and photograph anything that needs attention, which on an older house is often the most useful part of the visit; anything beyond the gutter is quoted separately under our roof repairs in Stirling service. Where brackets will not hold because the timber behind them has rotted, we replace the fascias and soffits in Stirling at the same time rather than fixing new gutter to a board that is failing.