Gutters in Sacramento: a guide to repair, installation and cleaning

Sacramento gutters sit dry for seven months, then get everything at once

The rain gauge at Sacramento Executive Airport averages about 18 inches a year, and nearly all of it lands between November and March. From May to October the gutters do nothing but collect what the trees drop. Then a long winter storm comes over the coast range and puts an inch or two on the roof over a day, and a gutter that has been filling with sycamore leaves and liquidambar balls since June has to work for the first time in half a year.

That is most of the story of gutter trouble here. It's rarely the intensity of the rain — a Sacramento storm is long and steady, a quarter to half an inch an hour, not a Gulf Coast cloudburst. It's the volume arriving in a system that's half full of debris, pitched wrong from thirty years of hangers backing out, and draining into a downspout whose bottom end is packed with silt.

The tree canopy is the second half. Sacramento calls itself the City of Trees for a reason: London planes and elms over the streets in Land Park and East Sacramento, valley oaks in Carmichael and Fair Oaks, redwoods in front yards all over Arden-Arcade, and liquidambars — the ones with the spiked seed balls — planted by the thousand in the 1960s and 70s. Every one of them drops something into a gutter, and most of them do it in December, when the gutter has to be clear.

The third piece is the housing. Arden-Arcade, Carmichael, Tahoe Park and South Land Park are full of 1950s–70s ranch homes with low-pitch roofs, wide eaves and the original spike-and-ferrule gutters. Roseville, Folsom and Rocklin are 1990s–2010s stucco with concrete tile roofs, where the gutter has to hang under a tile overhang that the builder's crew often got wrong. Gutters on those two kinds of house fail in different ways, and a good contractor will tell you which you've got.

What each kind of gutter work involves

Repair — resealing corners and end caps, re-hanging sagging runs on hidden hangers, replacing crushed downspouts, adding a downspout to a long run, clearing the buried drain line at the bottom, and replacing the rotted fascia that often turns up behind old gutters. Most repairs typically run $175–$700 and take a morning. The gutter repair guide walks through each one with typical prices.

Seamless replacement and new installation — this is the busiest gutter work from September through November. Old sectional aluminum or rusted steel comes down; new 5-inch or 6-inch seamless aluminum goes up, formed on site to the length of each wall, with 3x4 downspouts where the roof area needs them. A typical single-story Sacramento home is $1,800–$2,600 installed. See the gutter replacement and installation guide and the pricing page.

Gutters for tile roofs — Roseville and Folsom homes with S-tile or flat concrete tile need hangers that reach under the first course without cracking it. Builder crews often screw a standard hanger to the fascia; that's the mistake to avoid. The tile roof gutters page explains what's different.

Gutter guards — worth it under a London plane or a redwood, not worth it under two ornamental pears. The gutter guards page sorts guard types by the tree you actually have.

Gutter cleaning — often the first visit, and a good one comes with a ladder check of the roof gutters, hangers and fascia. Gutter cleaning is usually flat-priced by home size.

Areas this guide covers

The city itself — Land Park, East Sacramento, Midtown, Curtis Park, Oak Park, Tahoe Park, the Pocket, Natomas — and the unincorporated county: Arden-Arcade, Carmichael, Fair Oaks, Orangevale, Rancho Cordova. Out the 80 to Roseville and Rocklin, the 50 to Folsom, south to Elk Grove, and west to Davis. Roseville and Folsom have their own guides because their tile roofs, oaks and soils make gutters in those suburbs a different job from the ones in the city's older neighborhoods.

Licensing, since people ask

California requires a CSLB license for most gutter jobs above the state's small-job limit. Check the current limit, and which license classification covers your job, with the Contractors State License Board; its license lookup also shows the bond and workers' comp status. Ask for a certificate of liability insurance sent by the contractor's agent. This site's referral policy: we only use gutter contractors licensed by the California Contractors State License Board — ask for their CSLB number.

Why September matters

The install calendar fills up in the fall. Every homeowner in the region who saw water pouring off the roof last February and did nothing about it in the dry months remembers around the first week of October, and by then the good contractors are booked into December. If your gutters need replacing, get an estimate in September and pick a date. If you only need them cleaned and checked, the storm-season checklist is the walk-around to do before the first storm, and the fall leaf-season guide explains why cleaning in October is usually too early.