Am I foolish in thinking that I can save money by getting a local sheet metal guy to fab up some seamless (.032 mil) aluminum gutters-and then install them myself? Online I looked at some nice half round aluminum gutters from an outfit in the Chicago area but damn if the shipping doesn’t double the cost.
I really don’t have the time-or the brake-to bend it up myself otherwise I might have a go at it. Nor do I have the money-or need to have professional gutter installers come and charge me much more than it will cost to do it myself. After all the hanging part is easy…Thoughts?
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You've got 2 basic choices. 1. Hire a gutter company to do it. They'll come out and extrude the gutter sections to length right on the site and install it. They know what they're doing and can handle long runs of gutter without screwing it up. 2. Buy prefab gutter sections and assemble them. I don't know abou aluminum, but I got copper in 20' lengths. A 20' piece of al. gutter is going to be pretty fragile. My longest run was 40'. With copper all the joints are soldered. With aluminum they're caulked. The seamless guys install the downspout adapters in the gutter itself, you can do this, too, if you buy from a gutter supply and not from a home store.
Granted, it's been about 30 years ago, but we had our entire house done -- roughly 150 linear feet plus 50 feet of downspout -- for $250. I would likely have spent $150 on the pieces had I done it myself, and it would have taken me 2-3 weekends, whereas they had it done in about 3 hours.
Unless there's some Gutter Mafia near you driving up prices I seriously doubt you can justify doing it yourself vs hiring a seamless guttering outfit to do it.
Ditto what Dan says. A gutter guy has a machine on his truck that eats coil aluminum and poops seamless gutter
He will extrude and install it cheaper than you can buy it.
Of course, do be aware that there are good outfits and bad ones, just like in any other trade. You want to vet the outfit just like you'd do a roofer or any other conrtractor.
One thing to check, of course, is what gauge AL they use. The outfit we chose was the only one in the area that used heavy-gauge AL.
Commercial grade will be 20 gauge (,032), it goes all the way down to around 24 or even 26 gauge but that is pretty flimsy stuff.