Gutter Cover: The History

There's such a huge collection of gutter guards on the market that you might think it's always been this way, with many different technologies competing to keep leaves out of your gutter, and you off your ladder.  But that wasn't always the case.

For years, if you wanted to try to keep leaves out of your gutter, you had only one option: mesh screens.  The idea seemed simple enough: if you screen your gutters, leaves can't get through the screens, while water can.  Unfortunately, there's the small problem of how the screens get cleaned off.

Worse, the screens didn't really do their job: they buckled and rose easily, allowing debris to get in.  Despite gutter technology itself changing substantially in the early 1960s, with seamless gutters being introduced and rapidly taking over the market for gutters, mesh screens were your only option until the early 1980s. 

And then, Gutter Helmet came to the market.

Not to toot our own horn, but our founder, Bob Demartini, obtained a patent in 1981 that offered a new way of keeping debris out and water in.  Demartini's idea, which he developed over twenty years, was to use the physics of how water flows to develop a solid gutter cover. 

Called the “nose-forward” design, it used capillary action to pull water into the gutter while giving debris a solid cover that it couldn't get through.  Water tends to follow a surface up and around: just look at an overhang the next time it rains, and you'll see drops coming from multiple points on the overhang.  Bob's system used this property of water to show that a solid cover was possible for the first time.

This sparked a boom in the gutter protection market in the '80s, with dozens of competing products coming to market and introducing their own innovations, but all of them including some variety of Bob's nose-forward design.  Bob himself obtained seven patents as he refined his system, the most important being the textured and ribbed surface, which kept the water sticking even closer to the Helmet while helping to keep debris away.

Now, thirty years later, solid gutter guards are so common, and so popular, that even the seamless gutters can be extruded with a nose-forward cover.  And the science is moving ever forward: as new materials are developed and new ideas are tested, gutter covers will keep improving.  We're looking forward to the future, both with what we bring to the table and what our competitors innovate.

After all, anything's better than those mesh screens!