Painted mission-brown, and made from galvanised steel, our gutters probably came with the house in 1965. However, as much as I love mid-century modern, gutters that leave puddles of water in front of the back door for me to step in, instead of delivering said water into the water tanks, is not cool. They had to be replaced, and soon.

Cheap Geek and I opted for continuous guttering in Colourbond steel. It was a little bit more expensive than the traditional ‘stick-length’ guttering, but it meant less wastage on installation. We also requested wider-than-standard downpipes. Downpipes with a large diameter should be able to cope better with a future climate-change-related ‘increase in the number and intensity of extreme rainfall events’ (via CSIRO)*.

The gutters went up 2 weeks ago and there are no more leaks on the back porch! We also found out from Alan Cuthbertson, a Sustainable House Day 2015 host, that drying your clothes inside in winter is a dumb idea: wet clothes on a clothes horse is pretty much a primitive evaporative cooling system. Chris Woodford from ExplainThatStuff! whilst detailing the science behind drying clothes, notes

…no matter how you dry clothes, you have to put in energy from somewhere to evaporate the water. Dry things outside and that energy comes for free from the Sun and the wind. Dry things on indoor radiators and the energy comes from your stove, gas boiler, or heating system. The laws of physics tell us that you cannot dry clothes for free indoors: the energy has to come from somewhere.

So drying the clothes on a non-leaky porch should, in theory, help reduce our heating costs. New guttering FTW!

*Thankyou Michael Mobbs for highlighting the need to prepare for climate-change-related storm events.