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A gutter system is only half a solution. It catches the water coming off the roof and moves it to one place, and then the job is finished as far as the gutter is concerned. What happens to that water after it leaves the downspout is a separate question, and on most lots nobody has ever answered it deliberately.
The answer matters, because of what a gutter system does by design. It takes the rain falling across the whole roof and concentrates it into a handful of outlets, and those outlets are usually close to the wall. Put that concentrated flow in the wrong place and you have aimed the entire roof’s rainfall at one spot beside the house.
At Big Easy Gutter, we install and correct gutter systems across the New Orleans area, and the discharge point is the part most often left as whatever the builder did.
If you are not sure where your downspouts are actually putting water, contact us for an assessment.
The principle behind everything below is simple enough to state in one line: get the water far enough from the house that it cannot come back, and send it somewhere that can absorb it without sending it to a neighbor. Everything else is detail.
Three tests, and a discharge point has to pass all three.
It has to be far enough from the wall that the water cannot find its way back against the structure. It has to land somewhere that slopes away rather than somewhere that holds. And it has to not create a problem for anyone else, which on the tight lots common around here is a real constraint rather than a courtesy.
Water discharged at the base of the wall soaks the ground immediately beside the structure, every time it rains. Water discharged onto a flat or back-sloping area sits there. Water discharged toward a boundary becomes the neighbor’s problem and, eventually, a conversation.
Each of those is created at the downspout, not at the gutter, and each is fixable without touching the gutter at all.
That last point is worth sitting with, because it changes what you are shopping for. Homeowners who notice a drainage problem often start by pricing new gutters, and on a system that is otherwise sound that is money spent on the wrong end. The gutter can be doing its job perfectly while the discharge arrangement quietly undoes it.
Do this during real rain rather than by reasoning about it on a dry day.
Stand outside in a downpour and follow each downspout. Note where the water lands, which direction it travels, whether it pools, how far it spreads, and whether any of it runs back toward the house. Five minutes of this tells you more than an hour of inspection afterwards.
What you are looking for: water that stops within a couple of feet of the wall, water that pools anywhere, water heading toward a boundary, and water disappearing somewhere you cannot account for.
That last one deserves attention rather than relief. Water that vanishes has gone somewhere, and the usual candidates are into the ground right beside the house, into a crawl space, or into an old drain nobody has checked in years. A downspout that appears to cope is not the same as one that is discharging well.
Take a photo at each downspout while it is raining. The pattern is far easier to compare later from a picture than from memory, and if you end up getting the work quoted, those photos are the most useful thing you can hand over.
The ground next to the house should fall away from it. Where it does not, no discharge arrangement will work, because you are asking water to run uphill.
Check it simply: set a level on a straight board laid on the ground running away from the wall, and see which way it reads. Do it at each downspout and at any spot where you saw pooling in step 1.
Two things commonly go wrong. Soil settles over the years and the original fall flattens or reverses. And landscaping, raised beds, added paths and patios all change the levels, often without anyone thinking about where the water used to go.
Mulch is a quiet contributor to this. Topping up beds against the house each year raises the ground a little at a time, and after enough seasons the bed sits higher than the ground it is supposed to drain into. Nobody makes that decision, it accumulates.
Paved surfaces are the other one. A path or patio laid against the house changes both the level and the absorption. Water that used to soak in now runs, and where it runs is decided by whatever fall the paving was laid to, which may never have been considered.
Grading is the foundation of the whole thing. An extension that discharges onto ground sloping back toward the house has only moved the problem a few feet.
The basic move is to extend the discharge point out beyond the zone where water can work back against the structure.
Options run from simplest to most involved. A splash block redirects water away from the wall and breaks its fall so it does not dig a hole, but it only moves it a short distance. A downspout extension, rigid or flexible, carries it further out to a chosen point. A buried extension runs underground to a discharge point well clear of the house, which keeps the yard clear and is the tidiest arrangement where there is somewhere sensible for it to surface.
Which one suits depends on the distance you need, what the ground is doing, and whether the route crosses anything you would rather not have a pipe in.
There is a sequencing point worth making here too. Extending a downspout is the cheap, visible move and it is usually where people start, but if the grading in step 2 is wrong then the extension is being asked to compensate for ground that is working against it. Where both need attention, the ground comes first. An extension onto corrected ground is a small job. An extension onto ground that still falls the wrong way is a longer pipe to the same outcome.
Two practical points on extensions. Anything on the surface has to survive being walked on, mowed around and occasionally kicked, so the fixing at the downspout matters as much as the extension itself. A hinged or removable arrangement is worth considering where the run crosses somewhere you need clear.
And whatever the type, it needs a fall along its length. An extension laid flat holds water, and a run that holds water holds debris, silts up, and eventually discharges at the downspout again exactly as though it were not there.
Getting the water away is half the job. Where it lands is the other half.
A good landing spot slopes away from the house and away from boundaries, is planted or otherwise able to absorb water rather than being sealed, and is not somewhere anyone walks regularly. A bad one is flat, is adjacent to a boundary, or is a paved area that simply moves the water somewhere else at speed.
The walking point is not a minor one. A discharge across a path or a driveway is a slip risk in the rain, and over time it grows algae on the surface, which makes it worse. If the only sensible route crosses somewhere people walk, that is an argument for a buried run rather than for accepting the surface discharge and hoping.
It is also worth knowing where the water goes after it leaves your landing spot. A yard that drains toward a low corner is fine until that corner is asked to take the whole roof.
Concentrating the roof’s discharge at a single point on a small lot is the situation to think hardest about, because that is a lot of water arriving in one place. Spreading it between discharge points, or choosing a spot that can genuinely absorb it, is usually better than engineering a longer run to the same overloaded location.
Watch what the landing spot does over a season rather than judging it on the day. Grass that thins, soil that stays dark between rains, or a low spot that has started to form are all the ground telling you it is taking more than it can handle. Those signs arrive well before anything dramatic does.
A common mistake is treating the house as one problem. It is not, because each downspout serves a different part of the roof, discharges into different ground, and has different space around it.
Work through them one at a time. The downspout on the side with two feet of space and a neighbor’s wall opposite needs a different answer from the one discharging into an open back yard. Solving the easy ones and leaving the awkward one is fine as a sequence, as long as the awkward one is genuinely on the list rather than quietly dropped.
People often ask whether this needs doing on every downspout or only the one causing visible trouble. Every one, eventually, because each discharges into different ground with different space around it. Starting with the obvious problem is sensible, as long as the others do not get forgotten the moment that symptom stops.
It is also worth checking whether every downspout is earning its place. A roof with too few outlets concentrates more water at each one, and adding a downspout is sometimes a better answer than engineering a longer run away from an overloaded one. That is a gutter question rather than a drainage question, but it gets answered in the same conversation.
The work is not verified until it has been rained on properly.
Go back out during the next real downpour and repeat step 1. You are checking that the water reaches where you intended, that it does not pool at the new landing point, that nothing runs back toward the house, and that nothing has started heading toward a boundary that was not an issue before.
Adjustments at this stage are normal and usually small. Skipping this check is how an arrangement that looked right on paper stays wrong for years.
It is worth repeating the check seasonally rather than once. Ground settles, planting grows in, beds get topped up and paving gets added, and any of those can undo an arrangement that was correct when it was installed. A downspout that was discharging perfectly two years ago is not necessarily discharging perfectly now.
A short note in your phone after each check is enough. What you want on record is where each downspout discharges, what you changed and when, so that the next person looking at it, whether that is you or a contractor, is not starting from scratch.
Where the water goes is the cheapest part of a gutter system to get right and the part most often left to chance. A downspout that has been dumping at the base of a wall since the house was built has been doing it quietly, every rain, for as long as it has been there.
The fix is usually straightforward: confirm the fall away from the house, extend the discharge to somewhere that can take it, and check it in the rain. For what that water does when it is left beside the wall, we covered that in our piece on gutter overflow and your foundation.
Here at Big Easy Gutter, we handle gutter installation and gutter repair across the New Orleans area, and we look at where the water ends up rather than stopping at the downspout.
Call us at (504) 208-2247 and we will walk the lot with you.
Far enough that the water cannot work its way back against the wall, which depends on your ground and your slope rather than on a single universal number. Watching where the water actually travels in heavy rain is a better guide than a figure, and it is the check worth doing before and after any change.
Sometimes, where the ground already falls away well and the roof area feeding that downspout is modest. Where the ground is flat, slopes back, or the downspout is carrying a large section of roof, a splash block moves the water a short distance and little else.
It should not be, and on the tight lots common here it is one of the easier ways to create a dispute. Choose a landing spot that slopes away from boundaries as well as away from your own house.
That is worth saying out loud rather than working around, because the honest answer sometimes involves grading work or a solution beyond what a gutter contractor provides. We will tell you when that is the case rather than fitting a longer extension to the same bad spot.
Buried runs keep the yard clear and look tidier, and they need a sensible place to surface and a route that does not cross anything problematic. Surface extensions are simpler, easier to inspect and easier to adjust, which matters more than it sounds when you are still working out where the water should go.
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