A programmer trying to fix roof gutter overflow

The "Gutter Helmet" is, essentially, a sheet of aluminium with a single slot along its length that allows rainwater into the gutters, while keeping (most of) the leaf debris out of the gutters. It's probably more of a necessity on houses surrounded by mature trees that will be dropping leaves onto the roof, but I'm not one to judge. Here's the thing, though: there is a significant difference in the velocity of the water rolling off the roof during a gentle rain and that of the streams pouring off during a torrential downpour.

Not a week after our gutters were installed, we experienced one of the aforementioned downpours. I stepped out onto my stoop to reassure myself that the gutters were equal to the task of handling that volume of water, which they were. Then I looked across the street at the neighbor's house. There was a veritable cataract of water cascading down the roof surface, skipping, for the most part, over the gutter helmets, and producing an impressive drip line in the poor guy's freshly groomed flower beds. He was standing on the stoop, phone in hand, gesticulating wildly at the waterfall and apparently having a loud, boisterous conversation with someone at the other end of the line! Couple days later, the gutter helmet guys were back in his yard, removing the helmets (and presumably refunding his money).

The hack described in the article is almost certainly less expensive than the helmet my neighbor bought, and I'm guessing it would be a lot more effective as well. Perhaps more debris can penetrate the mesh than the sheet aluminium helmet, but by the same token, the greater volume of rainwater captured should wash that debris away more effectively than the smaller volume with a helmet.

That said, it's still a Really Bad Idea to have the roof slope toward the house. Over time, that will cause bigger and bigger problems. Hope the OP can get that fixed soon.

Regular, manual maintenance will be the only way apart from refactoring the building. This might just push the problem to other areas of the system which also don't scale.

You could also invert the gutter. Rather than be a tube that can clog, use open materials that guide debris to where you'd like it, but are designed to release debris along the path should it start to collect. Something like a rain chain or spiral for downspouts. Shallow, wide channels could direct water to the edges and then overhang could help "pour" the water to the downspout.

I recently read http://www.amazon.com/The-Mystery-Capital-Capitalism-Everywh... which explains this. The problem arises when the formal property system fails to capture the actual contracts that actual people live by, and makes it unbelievably hard for someone outside of the legal system to get into it. Then you get a situation where people live in houses, but cannot prove their title, and this causes all sorts of complications such as the necessity of bribing government officials (because they are squatters) and the impossibility of getting loans.

By contrast if the formal property system is fixed, you get a situation where professionals can build a house, then sell it to a person who mortgages it, and then pays it off slowly. The overall cost of building the house is less, the quality of the house is better, it simply makes sense to do things right. But this is impossible without formal property because nobody can make money building houses that nobody else can afford, and banks can't lend people that much money without having a way to reclaim property if people fail to pay. So people are stuck building their houses slowly and expensively.

And this is one of a myriad of ways in which it is bad for a country to have the formal property system out of sync with the actual contracts by which people live by.

The theory sounded great, but does it work in practice? Well the country where the author got to try his ideas out was Peru. Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Peru it seems that the lot of the average Peruvian has indeed continued improving since the book was written, so that's reasonable evidence that his theory works.

Should have led with that, I would have read with more interest.

I could be wrong but putting mesh over gutters is already fairly common in the USA.

Back to gutters, best of luck. Have you heard of gutter cleaning robots?

An alternative to gutter guards we have here in the States is gutter cleaning services.

A subscription-based gutter cleaning service in Sri Lanka might be a interesting startup.

One thing to consider in developed countries is that some products slide under the first row of shingles and may void your roof warranty... then again most of us around here like to do that sort of thing with our projects, albeit with less expensive investments than our houses.

It seems the only real solution is to ensure the product has no real holes or openings, like certain fine mesh products that have holes only microns in size. Again, it seems the real problem here is standardization and it presents an interesting entrepreneurial opportunity.