What Leaf Collection in Canton, OH Does and Does Not Fix for Gutters

Every November the same question comes up on Canton streets: what do I do with all these leaves? The city has an answer for the ones on your lawn. It has no answer for the ones on your roof, and those are the ones that cause damage. Here is what the city's service covers, straight from its published sanitation rules, and where it stops.

How does Canton collect leaves?

In bags, with the regular trash. The City of Canton Sanitation Department's rules say yard waste such as grass clippings, leaves and twigs must be bagged separately and set at the curb. Leaf bags may be no larger than 45 gallons and have to be light enough to handle. They go out on your normal trash day. Branches and brush are bundled and tied, no longer than four feet.

The city suggests composting first. It also warns residents never to dump leaves into a creek or a storm drain.

What the published rules do not describe is a truck that vacuums loose piles from the curb, as some other Ohio cities run each fall. In Canton, raking leaves to the street does not get them picked up. It sends them toward the storm drains.

What does street sweeping add?

The Street Department sweeps to keep debris out of the drainage system. Its stated goal is to reach every city street at least once a year. The city is divided into four quadrants and the sweepers work through them in a clockwise rotation, starting in a different quadrant each year. Routes 30 and 62 take priority. That schedule is not built around leaf season, so a sweeper may or may not pass your house in November.

What does all of that fix?

• The lawn. Bagged leaves leave your property within a week.
• The curb and the catch basin, as long as leaves are bagged and not pushed into the street.
• The sidewalk, which matters once wet leaves freeze.

It is a sound system for what lands on the ground.

What does it not fix?

Anything above the ground. A two-story house can have well over a thousand square feet of roof, and whatever lands on it drains toward a couple of hundred feet of gutter. No bag, sweeper or trash truck touches that. Four gaps stand out.

• The roof and gutters. City service ends at the curb. What is in the gutter stays until someone climbs up and takes it out.
• Timing. Most people bag once or twice and call the yard done. Oaks and Norway maples keep dropping into December, after the rake has been put away.
• Spring. Seeds and tassels fall in May, when nobody is thinking about leaves. They are small, and they go to the downspout.
• Downspouts. A blocked downspout cannot be seen from the yard. The first sign is water coming over the front of the gutter in a hard rain.

What happens when gutters are left full?

Water takes the shortest way down, and that is no longer the downspout. It runs over the front edge and digs a trench along the foundation. It runs over the back edge and soaks the fascia until the wood goes soft. In winter the wet mass freezes, and the weight pulls spikes out of the board. None of this shows up in a single season. It shows up as peeling paint, a damp basement corner or a gutter hanging an inch lower than it did.

Where do gutter guards fit in?

A guard does for the roof what the bags do for the lawn. It keeps leaves from staying where they cause trouble. With stainless micro-mesh across the gutter, leaves land on top, dry and blow off. Many of them end up on the grass, where the rake and the 45-gallon bags can deal with them. Seeds and needles stay out too, which coarse screens cannot manage.

That is the case for gutter guards in Canton in one sentence: the city handles the ground, and the roof is up to you. A guard is not maintenance free. The mesh wants a rinse now and then. But a rinse from a hose is a different job from scooping a gutter by hand, twice a year, from the top of a ladder.

What should you do this fall?

1. Bag lawn leaves and set them out on trash day. Keep them out of the street.
2. Check each downspout during a steady rain. Water should run from the bottom.
3. Look along the gutter line from the yard for sags and for plants growing in the trough.
4. If the gutters fill more than once a season, get a price on guards. The measurement is free and the written price holds for a year.

The gutter guard cost page explains how that price is built. When you are ready, Canton Gutter Guards can have the owner out to look, with a photo report the same day.