Overflowing eavestrough? How to find the cause from the ground, and fix it

The first proper fall rain in Orillia usually lands somewhere around Thanksgiving, and that is the week the same question comes in over and over. Water is sheeting over the front of the eavestrough, straight onto the step or the garden, and the person asking wants to know if the eavestrough is broken.

Usually it is not. Most overflowing eavestroughs are a plug, and most plugs are at the downspout, not in the trough. The good news is you can figure out which problem you have without climbing anything. Where the water comes over tells you why.

Watch where it spills

Next time it rains properly, go outside with a coffee and look at the roof edge for five minutes. You are looking for one of these five patterns.

1. It pours over at one spot, right beside a downspout. This is the most common one by a long way. The trough is draining toward the outlet, the outlet is blocked, and the water has nowhere to go but over the lip. The plug is almost always in the first elbow just below the trough, where the downspout bends back toward the wall. Leaves and maple keys jam in that bend and pack tight.

2. It comes over the front edge along the whole run. The trough itself is full. That is what the photo at the top of this post looks like up close: pine needles packed above the lip, with grass growing in the mat. Once it gets to that stage, rain soaks into the debris and spills over the front wherever it likes.

3. It drips down behind the eavestrough, between the trough and the house. Look for dark streaks on the fascia board. Water running down the back side means the trough is full enough to back up under the roof edge, or the trough has pulled away from the fascia slightly and water is finding the gap. This is the one that quietly rots wood, because you cannot see it from the street.

4. It spills in the middle of a long run, and the trough looks clean. That is a sag. A hanger has let go, the trough has a low point, and water pools there instead of running to the outlet. Cleaning will not fix it. It needs to be re-hung so it pitches toward the downspout again.

5. It only overflows in a downpour, at an inside corner. Where two roof slopes meet in a valley, all the water from both slopes funnels into one short stretch of eavestrough, and in a heavy storm it shoots straight past the trough. Nothing is blocked. The fix is a small splash guard at the corner, or a bigger downspout on that run.

If you saw pattern 1 or 2, it is a cleaning job. Patterns 4 and 5 are repairs. Pattern 3 can be either, and is worth a closer look either way.

Check the downspout without a ladder

You can confirm a plugged downspout from the ground in about two minutes.

• Knock on it. Work your way up the downspout tapping with your knuckles. A clear one sounds hollow and tinny all the way up. A packed section sounds dull.
• Pull the bottom elbow off. On most houses it is held on by friction or a couple of small screws. Shine a flashlight up the pipe. If you can see daylight, the vertical pipe is clear and the plug is up top.
• Run a garden hose up from the bottom. Feed it up the pipe with the water running. If it hits a plug it will push some of it loose, and you will get a mess at your feet, which is what you want.

What you cannot clear from the ground is the elbow right under the trough. If the vertical pipe is clear and water still backs up, that top bend is your plug, and it means a ladder.

Why Orillia eavestroughs fill the way they do

Two things about Orillia make overflow more common here than in a newer subdivision in south Barrie.

The first is white pine. There is a lot of it along Lake Couchiching and through the older streets between downtown and Couchiching Beach Park. Maple leaves are big, and a lot of them blow off the roof on a windy day. Pine needles do the opposite. They lie flat, mat together, and hold water like a sponge, which is how you end up with the trough in that cover photo. Rain does not flush needles through. They have to come out by hand.

The second is age. A lot of Orillia's housing is older, and older houses tend to have more hangers that have worked loose over the years, more patched seams, and sometimes narrower troughs than the 5-inch size most new builds get. A narrower trough holds less, so it fills sooner and overflows in a storm that a newer house would handle.

What you can fix yourself

A single-storey house with a plugged trough or outlet is a reasonable weekend job if you have a stable ladder and someone to foot it. Scoop the trough out by hand, start at the end farthest from the downspout, then run a hose along the trough toward the outlet. If the water backs up at the outlet, push the hose down into the downspout from the top and let it clear the elbow. Do not just blow the debris out with a leaf blower. That clears the dry top layer and leaves the wet sludge at the bottom, which is the part that blocks the outlet.

A sag is a matter of putting in a new hanger at the low point. If you are handy and the house is one storey, it is doable. If the fascia behind it is soft when you push on it, stop there, because the hanger has nothing solid to hold onto and you are now looking at a fascia repair.

Two storeys is where I would stop doing it yourself. Most of the time spent on a two-storey eavestrough clean is moving and resetting the ladder safely, and the elbow you most need to reach is the one at the very top.

Do not leave it going into winter

An eavestrough that overflows in October will be a solid block of ice by January. Every time snow melts on the roof that winter, the water hits the full trough, refreezes at the edge, and starts to build an ice dam. We cover the timing in more detail in when to clean your gutters in the fall, but the short version is that the job gets harder and more expensive once the trough has frozen.

If you are thinking of guards so this never happens again, read whether gutter guards actually work here first. They help with leaves. They do much less for pine needles.

If you want us to do it

We clear the troughs by hand, flush every downspout until it runs free, bag the debris and take it away, and send you a photo of anything that looks loose, sagging or soft, including the fascia. We do not do eavestrough repair or replacement ourselves, so if we find a sag or a rotted board, we will tell you honestly and point you to someone who does.

A single-storey house is usually $150 to $200, and a standard two-storey is $200 to $300. We are based in Horseshoe Valley, about half an hour from Orillia, and there is no travel charge anywhere in Simcoe County.

You can see how we work on the Orillia gutter cleaning page, check the full gutter cleaning service if you are elsewhere in the county, or get a number right now from the instant quote.