What a built-in gutter actually is

Walk down Clifton Boulevard or the older streets in Clifton Park and look at the roof edge. On a lot of the big houses there is nothing hanging there. No K-style aluminum, no half-round on brackets. The cornice steps out from the wall in molded wood and the slate just ends above it.

The gutter is behind that molding. Builders in the 1890s through the 1920s framed a trough into the top of the cornice, lined it with sheet metal, and ran the roof into it. Terne-coated steel was the usual lining here, copper on the houses with money. The trough pitches to an outlet that drops into a downspout, sometimes inside the wall, sometimes out the back of the cornice into a conductor head. The names for it vary: built-in gutter, box gutter, Yankee gutter, standing gutter. On a Lakewood street it is almost always the first kind.

It is a beautiful system when it is sound. The gutter is invisible, it holds far more water than a 5-inch aluminum run, and the metal lining lasts fifty years or more if it is kept clean and painted. When it is not sound, it is the most expensive gutter in the city.

How to tell if your house has one

Three checks from the sidewalk, no ladder:

  • The roof edge shows a deep, molded wooden cornice, often with brackets or dentils, and no visible gutter along it.
  • Downspouts start below the cornice, sometimes from a decorative box (the conductor head) rather than from an elbow at the roof edge.
  • The house is slate-roofed, or was, and dates from before about 1930. The bungalows and colonials of the 1920s mostly hung their gutters; the earlier and grander houses built them in.

If you see all three, the guide applies to you. If your roof edge has a white or brown aluminum gutter hanging on it, someone retrofitted the house decades ago and the rest of this site applies as normal.

How a built-in gutter fails

The lining is the whole story. Leaves and slate grit sit in the trough, hold water against the metal, and the metal rusts through at the seams or at the low point by the outlet. The water then goes where the lining used to keep it out: into the cornice wood, down the inside of the wall, and onto the plaster of the second-floor ceiling at the outside corner. That ceiling stain in the corner bedroom of a Clifton Park house is a box gutter announcing itself.

The second failure is the outlet. A built-in gutter drains through one or two holes, and each hole is a funnel for a hundred feet of roof. A tennis ball of maple seed and sycamore bark in that hole backs the whole trough up, and a trough full of standing water in January becomes an ice tray sitting directly on the framing.

The third is well-meaning repair. Somebody fills a rust hole with roof cement, it holds for two summers, and the water finds the next low spot. Every layer of tar makes the eventual proper fix harder.

What a gutter crew does, and does not do

Cleaning, yes. A built-in gutter needs to be scooped and flushed like any other, more carefully, because the lining can be sharp where it has rusted and the trough is often deeper than an arm. The pros we connect you with clean them, clear the outlets, and photograph the lining so you can see what condition it is in. That is the honest scope of a gutter company on this system.

Relining is not gutter work. Replacing a rusted lining means pulling the slate along the edge, rebuilding any rotted wood in the trough, fabricating and soldering new metal, and re-laying the slate. That is a roofer who does slate and a sheet-metal shop, and the number runs into the thousands per side. Anyone who offers to reline a box gutter from a gutter truck should be asked which slate roofer they are bringing.

There is a middle option that gets pitched a lot: abandon the built-in gutter, seal it over, and hang a modern aluminum gutter off the cornice. It works, it is cheaper, and on a plain house nobody minds. On a house with a cornice worth looking at, it changes the face of the building, and it should be a decision, not a default.

Keeping one alive

A sound built-in gutter wants three things a year: a spring cleaning after the maple seed, a fall cleaning after the drop, and a look at the lining with the trough empty. Paint on a steel lining is not cosmetic. It is what stands between the water and the rust, and it wants renewing every few years.

Watch the ceiling corners after a hard rain. Watch the outlet during a storm from the sidewalk: if the conductor head overflows, the hole is plugged. Watch the paint on the cornice for the first blister. All three are cheaper to act on than the stain that follows.

Cleaning a built-in gutter is priced after a look rather than from the per-house table, because the trough decides the time. For the houses with hung gutters, the normal Lakewood gutter cleaning and repair pages cover it.