Page 33 - HW April 2020

spouting & guttering
The current stay-at-home restrictions fell at exactly the right time in some respects – in fact just as homeowners would
be preparing to fettle their spouting & guttering... Steve Bohling reports.
MANAGING WATER ISN’T the easiest task. And getting it wrong can seriously harm a building and sooner, rather than later.
GutterCare is one of the biggest operators in the Auckland area when it comes to the installation and maintenance of domestic and commercial rainwater systems.
Englishman Ed Aitken is the boss and, like most of the rest of New Zealand, as I write he’s stuck at home, so I was able to talk with him at length.
Normally, March is the start of the company’s busiest period of the year which then runs hot all the way through to December.
In this respect I could sense Ed’s frustration at not being
able to go about his normal business but he was happy to share some insights which might help DIY retailers inform and advise DIYers and even some of the trade.
According to GutterCare’s accumulated wisdom:
• It’snotalwaysaDIYjob–growingawarenessofhealth&
safety around working at heights has attracted homeowners to
GutterCare’s services.
• Replacingacompletedomesticrainwatersystemisde nitely
not a job for every DIYer; it’s imperative (but not easy) to work
out the correct fall.
• It may seem that a rainwater system is blocked or “broken”
but GutterCare has found that mitigating the effects of
subsidence may be the real cure.
• eAucklandmarketplaceistheperfectstormforspouting
& guttering – it’s warm, wet and the high UV a ects all PVC
systems.
• Bottomline? elongevityofarainwatersystemisalmostall
about regular maintenance.
• Leafguardandscreentypeproductswillusuallyworkas
advertised – again, as long as regular maintenance is also addressed.
ree quarters of GutterCare’s business is regular gutter
maintenance, regular and maintenance being the key words here, the combination of which being one of, if not the fundamental reason why some rainwater systems last longer than others.
But it’s not all about cleaning and ushing; sometimes a system just won’t drain.
“You’ve got to look at exactly why things won’t drain. Because it doesn’t matter how well you maintain it, if it’s not draining the system gets overloaded and it will eventually just break. It will fail.”
DIYERS BEWARE?
Clearly armed with experience gained remedying DIYers’ e orts at replacing complete rainwater systems, Ed Aitken warns against a simple copy-and-replace approach: “What people tend to do, especially DIYers, is look at it, think ‘my gutters are broken’, and thenjustbuyaloadofguttertoreplacewhat’sthere.”
Trouble is, says Ed: “Unless they’re particularly switched on, they won’t get the fall right. And of course they won’t understandwhy[theirnewsystem]doesn’twork.”
e most extreme (and expensive) solution may be to reconstruct the roof line or install an alternative outlet around the house somewhere to nd a di erent way of getting the low point of the gutter.
The long and the short of it...
Like most successful brands, Marley’s attention is all-but- permanently trained on what its customers want.
This is certainly the case with the origin of one of its latest products and, although it’s not directly spouting & guttering related, it is certainly to do with water management.
Marley’s Nigel Montgomery explains;“We went and spoke to groups of plumbers and asked what could we do that would make their life easier?”
The short answer was ... a shorter boss gully trap.
Explains Nigel:“One thing that’s happened in home building is that, as designers look to reduce material costs, oor joist heights have decreased from 280mm to 230mm.
“This means you’ve got to squash a lot more into a smaller space. So we came up with a short boss gully trap called Compakt.”
By short, Nigel means just 199mm, or perhaps as much as 20% shorter than your typical PVC boss gully trap.
“The shorter boss means that plumbers don’t have to do costly and time-consuming workarounds like chiselling out
the underside of the ooring or the top of the GIB to try and still t in more traditional boss gully traps.
“So Compakt saves a lot of time, a lot of hassle. And, as a consequence, a lot of money.”
Another key plus is that Compakt is part of and integrates seamlessly with the rest of Marley’s
OPTIM DWV system, which is a bonus in terms of AS/NZS1260 compliance. It’s also Watermark
certi ed.
Compakt has been “really, really well received,”
says Nigel Montgomery, adding that Marley will be looking to bring more of this sort of
innovation into the plumbing sector that it has already brought to rainwater management.
www.marley.co.nz
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APRIL 2020 | NZHJ 31