All About Gutters, the Dummy Version

How about splash blocks, Chasity?

We appreciate it – really, we do! – when people who have experience and knowledge share their knowledge, training, and hands-on experience. We're also inclined to appreciate it when people who've done careful research share their knowledge as well; people like professional freelancer Mary Roach. On the other hand, there are people who perform a slap-dash thirty-second Google search and then reword some information from a couple of online sources as their version of "research." You can usually identify type two "journalists" because they make such a mess of their subject. That's not unlike Chasity Goddard, who, for some unknown reason, decided to specialize in gutters at the mother lode of misinformation, eHow.com. It's not as though she studied gutter science while getting that BA in Creative Writing. Here with her third DotD nomination on the same topic is Chasity's "Should Water Drain Into the Ground From a Gutter?" – now moved to HomeSteady.com.¹

The answer, as any halfwit already knows, is an emphatic "No!" Goddard surprised everyone here when she was right about that one, but in retrospect we figure that it would be hard to find a reference for "Yes." Of course, the inherent stupidity of "drain into the ground" means that Chasity should have said lots and lots about directing water away from the foundation, which she did... sort of. But let's look at what Chasity how gutters work first:

"The downspout that attaches to the end of the gutter allows the water in the gutter to drain to the ground. The purpose of the downspout is to direct the water from the gutter away from the home. When the downspout abruptly ends at the end of the home, the water pours too closely to the foundation, which can lead to damage."

We're still trying to figure out what "the end of the home" is... we guess that's a "creative writing" description. Goddard's solution, such as it is, is to install a "drain system," because the downspout "...must be extended with flexible black tubing or PVC pipes 3 to 4 feet from the exterior of the home..." Wow, we didn't know that black tubing was required! But, then, we also didn't know that "The purpose of the gutter is to remove rain water from the perimeter of the home..." ...we thought that gutters capture rainwater from the roof, while downspout extenders, splash blocks, drains, and grading direct water away from the foundation. Goddard even says, "When the downspout does not properly direct the gutter away from the home, the gutter system is useless."

Strange: we figured the downspout should direct the water away from the foundation, not the gutter; but what do we know? We're just homeowners who have gutters and downspouts, not freelancers. And then there's Chasity's definition of a french drain

"A French drain... transfers the water a safe distance from the house before depositing it into the soil..."

"[D]epositing it into the soil"? WTF does that mean? Goddard then blathers about drainage systems and rain barrels -- although she never gloms onto the fact that a rain barrel collects a few tens of gallons, nowhere near enough to offset the "thousands of gallons of water" she cites elsewhere -- not to mention that you still have to allow for overflow of a rain barrel.
No, Goddard never mentions simply redirecting the water with an extension or splash block, nor does she mention ensuring that the soil is graded properly around the foundation. She just tells her readers to install a drain system. That's what you get when you let a Dumbass of the Day provide information about a topic foreign to their experience.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/info_8270370_should-water-drain-ground-gutter.html

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