There's a version of gutter cleaning that's a leaf blower on a pole and twenty minutes of scattering debris onto your lawn. Then there's the version worth paying for. Knowing the difference protects you.
A real cleaning clears the runs by hand, bags the debris, and hauls it away. Then it flushes every downspout with water — this is the step the pole-blower version always skips, and it's the one that matters most, because a clean gutter over a clogged downspout is still a clogged system.
The flush doubles as a system test. Water moving through the runs shows whether the pitch still carries to the outlets or whether a low spot is pooling. Pooling water in a clean gutter means a hanger or pitch problem — exactly the kind of small finding that's cheap now and expensive later.
While we're up there, we're looking: hangers backing out, miters starting to weep, fascia paint bubbling behind the gutter, downspouts dumping against the slab, underground drain connections clogged at the boot. You get told what we saw, with photos if anything needs attention — and no invented problems if nothing does. A cleaning should end with your gutters clear and your knowledge of the system better than it was. That's the standard ours are run to.
