Woodward Gutter Replacement & Gutter Guard Installation

Putting downspout water to use

A roof produces a surprising amount of water. Every inch of rain falling on a thousand square feet of roof is something over six hundred gallons, and on a typical house all of it currently goes into the ground next to the foundation or out to the street. Diverting some of it is straightforward. A downspout can be fitted with a diverter that fills a barrel and then returns the overflow to the normal discharge path, which is the important detail: the system has to fail safe, so that a full barrel or a frozen one does not back water up against the house. Sizing is worth thinking about, since a single barrel fills in a light shower and everything after that is overflow. The winter question matters here too. Barrels need to be drained and taken out of the circuit before a hard freeze, and the diverter returned to normal discharge, or the arrangement becomes a liability at exactly the wrong time of year. Done properly it is a genuinely useful addition for irrigation. Done as an afterthought on a downspout that was already the problem elevation, it makes an existing drainage issue worse.