# Forum Home Renovation Roofing  A Lazy Way of Cleaning Gutters

## Charleville

I saw this idea on a US website a while ago but only got around to implementing it today. It works a treat and obviates the need to climb ladders to clean gutters on my high set house.  It is simply the connection of a small electric leaf blower to a long PVC pipe with appropriate fittings to allow the direction of an air blast into gutters to blow out the leaves from ground level…   
Of course, a restricting issue on using an appliance of some sort to cleaning gutters on a high set house from ground level is the weight of the tool and its balance. Viz, it is not good to handle if it is top heavy, nor heavy in any manner, really.   
So a few months ago, I saw these hand held blowers in the “Trade Tools" weekly catalogue and bought one, specifically for this purpose.    They are actually very good little units and well earn their value even as proper leaf blowers for cleaning off driveways etc.     
Take off the rubber nozzle and you get a tool that has a 40 mm outside diameter outlet…    
Bunnings sell 40 mm PVC pipe in various wall thicknesses but obviously thinner = lighter is better on a long tool like this. They do have a nominally 1 mm wall thickness DWV pipe that can be fitted to the blower via a straight coupling. (DWV = drainage, waste and vent purpose pipe). On my prototype, everything is just held together with duct tape but a neater arrangement could be machined with a locking pin in the coupling and its being glued to the main pipe, of course.   
At the business end, I have attached a couple of elbows and a nozzle which just comprises a short piece of the 40 mm pipe which I have fashioned into a slot by heating it in a vice with a hot air gun whilst gradually tightening the vice. The significance of having a slotted nozzle is that some of my gutters have only a small gap between them and the roof tiles.   
Experimentation with the angle at which to point down the nozzle resulted in a nozzle angle that was not that far off being 90º to the main pipe.  At that angle,  the angle of attack at the gutter is controlled most comfortably by the angle at which the whole contraption is held on ground level. Viz, you don’t really want the leaves being blown out directly above you. You will get showered with enough leaves and gritty stuff anyway without doing it right above you.  
Once again, whilst an elegant construction would have all of the elbows etc glued rather than duct taped, it is handy to reverse the direction of the nozzle at times so, the duct tape does a perfectly fine job for me and allows flexibility of choice of nozzle angle.  I actually did try operating the contraption without duct tape but alas, occasionally the nozzle would find a tight spot between gutter and roof tiles and come off, thus resulting in a ladder climb to retrieve it. I don’t wanna do that too often!  
The 40 mm DWV  pipe comes in maximum lengths of 3 m. I found this length to be workable but ultimately it becomes uncomfortable to hold the blower at chest height or higher continuously so I added a 1 m length of the same diameter pipe that I had on hand and used a short piece of PVC pressure pipe that I also had on hand to sleeve it on to the main pipe, thus giving me a 4 m long tool which did the job very comfortably. The 40mm PVC pressure pipe is defined by its inner diameter whereas the 40mm DWV pipe is defined by its outside diameter. Thus, the pressure pipe fitted very comfortably over the DWV pipe as a sleeve. I am guessing that it would have also been quite adequate to join the two DWV pipes with a glued inline coupling but at $2.50 for a coupling versus $5.25 for a metre of the pressure pipe, using a half metre of the pressure pipe as a coupler probably makes more sense from a strength perspective and costs no extra in real terms.  
In practice, the contraption works extremely well. There will always be trade-offs with using a tool like this to clean out high gutters and it might be tempting to do a few modifications such as using a more powerful blower than the handheld blower that I have used. However, a more powerful blower will have its own disadvantages of, firstly, being more tiring to hold due to its weight and also, with a more powerful thrust at the nozzle, we could imagine that any nozzle angle that is any other than pointing straight down, will result in a constant battle to hold the nozzle in place because of the horizontal component of the thrust.  
After my first usage of this contraption and a subsequent inspection of the gutter, it is clear that cleaning the gutters will need to be done a couple of times because, in these dry times, there is a fair amount of leaves and muck on the roof itself that is just waiting on the next downpour to find its way into the gutter. After that happens and the weather fines up and the gutters are dry, it will be time to do the job again. That is not a big hassle as cleaning the gutters with this contraption is quite easy and quick to do.

----------


## Uncle Bob

Good one  :Smilie:   :2thumbsup:

----------


## phild01

I thought a similar attachment was available to buy though what I remember was a short one for ladder use.

----------


## OBBob

He he ... inventing stuff is fun.  Frustrating that you still have to clean the gutters ... maybe the Mk II version can include the robot.   :Biggrin:

----------


## Charleville

> He he ... inventing stuff is fun.  Frustrating that you still have to clean the gutters ... maybe the Mk II version can include the robot.

  
Actually, the MkII version will probably involve paying some fit young fella to do it for me when this old rooster is past doing such stuff.    :Smilie:

----------


## Renopa

Fantastic!!!   I've done something similar with a long piece of PVC from Bunnings which fits onto the vacuum cleaner handpiece and with a brush or flattened nozzle (similar to the one you've made but was an original with the vac cleaner) and with this setup I can vacuum any fluff/dust/etc from the exposed, rough-sawn Oregon beams throughout the house.  Highest one is 6.5m above floor level and I can do them all while standing on the floor.  Gives the shoulders and upper arms a workout but much better than standing on a ladder.   After that's done I wrap a damp towel around the head of a broom, drop the broom handle into the PVC tube and clean the skylights....highest one is only about 3.5-4 metres so not too bad.   
Might have to think about something like your gutter cleaning wand.  Great ideas are often super-simple!

----------


## Oldsaltoz

Err, how do you prevent detritus being blown into the roof cavity via the bends in the roof sheeting?

----------


## Charleville

> Err, how do you prevent detritus being blown into the roof cavity via the bends in the roof sheeting?

  
Does it matter? 
I have been inside my roof many times in the 30+ years since I had the place built and I can say that it is a pretty dirty environment anyway.  eg not only does dust collect up there but of course, so does the odd rat skeleton and lots of debris from the original builders and tilers - eg bits of broken concrete tiles.   I need to go up there soon to replace the old TV VHF antenna that I installed in the roof cavity with the smaller UHF variety that is used these days with digital TV and I will be wearing old clothes that will be discarded after that exercise. 
Also, my home has 600 mm eaves that sit well below the ceiling level. Thus any detritus will most likely just get blown into the cavity above the eaves and not into the main roof space anyway. 
My past methods of cleaning gutters have included :Redface: 
 (a) doing it by hand using one of those Cyclone tools made for the purpose - very slow and not much fun on an extension ladder that must be dismounted and shifted every metre or so around the entire house;
(b) using a long air gun to blast out the leaves with compressed air - it works but there is not really as strong an air blast as is achieved with a leaf blower, plus it still needs to be done from the top of a ladder.
(c) using a Gerni - an awesome amount of thrust that blasts leave out over long distances of guttering thus not needing so many iterations of climbing the ladder. Whilst I have not noticed any deleterious impact of the short blasts of water inside the roof cavity, what gets deposited below on the ground and anything else that may be down there, such as garden furniture, is pretty yucky. Viz, not only leaves come down but also a red mud being oxides and other muck that is washed down over time from my red concrete tiled roof.* 
The ultimate gutter cleaning solution always appears to me to be the big vacuuming arrangements that some of the professionals use. (eg Guttervac | Gutter Cleaning Experts ) and one day, when I am too old to be a DIY'er, I will probably hire those guys.  But not yet. My new gadget works just fine.   
* BTW, having seen what ends up in roof gutters would turn me off ever using tank water collected off a domestic metropolitan roof for drinking water.   :Smilie:

----------


## phild01

The one I remember was on the vacuum setting of a leaf blower.

----------


## Charleville

> The one I remember was on the vacuum setting of a leaf blower.

  I have thought about the option of sucking rather than blowing but that assumes that there is an adequate gap between the roof covering and the gutters to get a vacuum wand in to suck up the leaves. That is less critical if a blower is used rather than a vacuum.

----------


## AllissiaNorth

Definitely a better and faster way than cleaning your gutter by hand, I'll give you that. But what about the downpipes? Have you cleaned them at all?    
 PS: I suppose vacuuming the leaves and the debris is much better than blowing them, since professional gutter cleaners do it that way.

----------

