Gutter replacement and seamless gutter installation in Pittsburgh

Why seamless

A seamless gutter is made on site from a single coil of aluminum, so each run is one piece from corner to corner. Sectional gutter from a hardware store has a joint every 10 feet, and in a climate that freezes and thaws forty times a winter every joint becomes a leak. Seamless gutters Pittsburgh homeowners have installed today should still be tight in twenty years; the sectional system they're replacing usually started weeping in eight.

Sizing for Pittsburgh

Rain here isn't as violent as the Gulf Coast, but it's steady and it comes with two things southern crews never think about: snow sliding off the roof and ice sitting in the trough for weeks. We size for both.

• 5-inch gutters with 3x4 downspouts on most single-story and modest two-story homes. The larger downspout roughly doubles capacity for a few dollars more per drop.
• 6-inch gutters on large roofs, steep slate or metal roofs where snow comes off in a sheet, and any run collecting more than about 1,000 square feet.
• Hangers every 16–24 inches with screws into the rafter tails — closer spacing on the north side of the house where ice lingers. Spike hangers are not something we install.
• A second downspout on any run over 35 feet. One downspout on a 60-foot run is the most common reason a clean gutter overflows.

The math for your own roof is in how much roof drains into one downspout.

Materials and colors

Aluminum gutters Pittsburgh homes get from us are .032 gauge, heavier than the .027 many crews use, in more than 25 baked-on colors. Rain gutters Pittsburgh has rely on aluminum rather than steel mainly because aluminum won't rust where a downspout meets a wet sidewalk or where road salt splashes. Copper and galvanized steel are quoted separately for the homes where they belong — copper on a slate-roofed house in Fox Chapel or Sewickley, for instance, where it will outlast everyone reading this.

What replacement includes

Gutter installation Pittsburgh PA crews do is mostly replacement — 1950s–70s aluminum in Ross Township, Bethel Park, Monroeville and Moon Township that has reached the end of its life. Every replacement includes:

• Tear-off and haul-away of the old gutters and downspouts
• A fascia check, with any rotted board replaced before the new gutter goes up (quoted per foot)
• New seamless gutter, corners, end caps and downspouts
• Downspout extensions or connections so water lands at least six feet from the foundation, or into a drain that we've confirmed still works
• A water test before we leave

Homes that never had gutters, or shouldn't get hung ones

Plenty of Pittsburgh homes have gutters on the front and nothing over the back porch or a side addition. Partial runs are fine; we'll do the wall that solves the problem. What we won't do is hang aluminum on the face of a built-in box gutter to hide a failed lining. That's a box gutter job, and the two get confused often enough that we wrote a separate page.

Installation day

The crew arrives with the coil and the forming machine on the truck. Old gutters come down, fascia gets checked, then each run is measured and formed to the exact wall length. Corners are sealed, downspouts strapped every 8 feet, extensions set, and we run a hose through everything. Most homes are done in a day. Hillside lots with a two-story drop on the downhill side, which is half of Pittsburgh, sometimes need staging and run into a second morning; we'll say so on the estimate.

Cost

Seamless aluminum installed is about $9–$15 per foot here. A single-story home with 140 feet and four downspouts is typically $1,400–$2,100; a two-story with 200 feet and six downspouts, $2,200–$3,200. The pricing page has the tables, and what the price per foot actually buys explains why three quotes on the same house can be $900 apart.