The Most Affordable Metal for
Your Gutter System
Pity the poor homeowner who has to maintain a historical landmark. Not only does he have dozens of restrictions on what he can do with his home, but he usually has to pay through the nose for "period accurate" gutters, which usually means one thing: copper.
The Most Expensive Gutter Metal
Foot for foot, copper is the most expensive metal from which a gutter can be made. It's so expensive that it's starting to affect companies that specialize in copper gutters, as homeowners look into cheaper solutions, like copper paint. But even the prices for steel and aluminum gutters are rising rapidly, making them targets for thieves and wallet-busters for homeowners.
Why? Raw metals prices. In fact, you should probably expect gutter prices to keep rising for a while, because everybody wants those metals...and they're willing to pay top dollar for them.
It goes a bit beyond supply and demand, though. Take copper. The reason copper gutters were so popular back in Victorian times, and even earlier, was that copper was fairly easy to form into a shape, it was fairly inexpensive compared to other metals, and over time, it formed a patina—which meant that the homeowner didn't need to paint his gutters. Considering that the big competition at the time was wood, copper was a pretty viable choice.
Fast forward to the modern era. Pretty much everything you use these days has copper in it. That's because copper is a great conductor of electricity. We've found better conductors, but copper is still the electronics industry workhorse, in everything from your phone to your air conditioning unit. And we're buying more and more electronics, which means more and more copper needs to be used. The end result? Electronics companies are paying top dollar for as much copper as they can get. And criminals are stealing anything copper and selling the metal for big bucks.
What About Steel and Aluminum?
These metals aren't commonly used in electronics, so they should be cheaper, right? Well, they are. But not by as much as you'd think. In those cases, you have an added culprit: the rest of the world.
China is a great example: the entire world has been touched by the Great Recession, but for China, all that means is that it's growing slightly slower than it was a few years ago. That means they need construction materials, which in turns means the Chinese are paying for as much steel and aluminum as they can get.
It's largely the same everywhere else in the world: construction may have slowed, but that just means it's going at a fast pace instead of a faster one. It doesn't help that the iPhone and iPad have aluminum cases: in fact, the recent disasters at some Chinese manufacturing plants were caused by aluminum dust exploding.
In short, even with the current economy, there's a lot of demand for a lot of metals, and that demand is only going up. So, when deciding what gutters to buy, keep a close eye on current metals prices: it'll tell you just how much will be coming out of your wallet.
