Gutter Guard in Aspley

Aspley sits about twelve kilometres north of the Brisbane CBD along the Gympie Road corridor, and it developed principally through the 1960s and 1970s, when Brisbane's northern suburbs expanded outward from Chermside. The housing that resulted is characteristic: low-set brick-and-tile homes on blocks of 600 to 800 square metres, generous setbacks and substantial gardens. Many of those blocks retained or planted eucalypts, and council street planting through the same era added more.

The critical point is the time gap. Those trees are now fifty and sixty years old and stand ten to twenty metres above roofs that sit barely three metres off the ground. Eucalypts are the least gutter-friendly species in the region. They shed leaf continuously rather than seasonally, drop long ribbons of bark in summer, and release hard gum nuts that roll to the low point of a gutter and lodge at the downpipe outlet.

Because the leaf drop never stops, an annual clean doesn't hold. Owners in Aspley typically find the gutters full again within four to six months, and a full gutter under a big gum is heavy. The compacted layer at the base holds water, corrodes the gutter from the inside, and gives mosquitoes somewhere to breed through the wet season.

The practical impact is a maintenance cycle that outruns most households, performed at height on a tiled roof that has been walked on for fifty years and cracks easily.

So that's what we plan for. The mesh we choose has holes small enough to stop fine gum leaf, and the rain still gets through. We set it at an angle so strips of bark blow off instead of lying across it. And in the free clean we take extra care with the downpipe outlets, because in Aspley that's almost always where a blockage starts.