I have done a lot of work to keep my porch from flooding recently. I jetted the drains, cleaned paint off of channel inlets, added additional piping to take water away to the back yard, and cleaned up a rotted door. All the work to clear the channel drain in the pool decking has helped the water move away more quickly, but when it rains hard a ton of water still floods down onto the porch. Here is the issue.

I have a really big section of roof across the back of the house that drains down to the pool area. If we get a mildly heavy rain coming in, the water coming off the roof has so much speed it shoots right over the gutter. Here is a shot from a low angle on the roof. You can’t even see the gutter.

To fix this issue I am going to install some gusher guards. They are usually for the corners of roof where you funnel a lot of water together and get high flows. Instead I am going to install them flat along that back section of gutter.

At first I was only able to find a few packs of the guards in town. I did a little over half of the gutter run back in August, then got distracted with hurricanes and work. I did get to test my theory out though. We had a duck drowner rain storm and I was able to capture this shot.

The area to the left of the red line has no guards, the area to the right does. Some water still gets past the guards on the right, but is largely captured. This is mostly due to the supports used between the pool enclosure and the roof line. I couldn’t fit a guard over them, so they let water skip right over the gutter. I don’t need to capture 100% of it, just enough to keep the deck from getting flooded badly.

Eventually I was able to pick up the remainder of the guards and get them installed. Now the entire long stretch of roof is covered.

If I repeat the low angle shot of the roof line, you can see the water will hit those guards and be guided into the gutter instead of jumping right over. Hopefully I can stop dealing with leaky items for a while.