Repairing Your Own Gutters

• Replacing a plastic union or a stop end on a bungalow, from a ladder.
• Refitting a loose downpipe clip you can reach from the ground or a step.
• Clearing a downpipe shoe or a gully at ground level.
• Checking the fall with a bucket of water from a bungalow ladder.

• Anything above the first floor. Gutters are at arm's length on a ladder, and leaning out is how falls happen.
• Anything over a conservatory, a glass roof or a flat roof.
• Cast iron: a length weighs a lot and has to be lifted out.
• Asbestos cement gutters on older houses: don't drill, cut or break them.

The Health and Safety Authority's guidance on working at height is written for work, but the ladder advice applies at home: the right ladder, on firm level ground, footed, at a 1 in 4 angle, and never over-reaching.

Plastic gutters come in half round, square, ogee and deep flow profiles, and the parts of one don't fit another. Take the old union or bracket to the shop to match it. A new union is a few euro; the ladder and the risk are the real cost.