Gutter Helmet has spent four decades betting against the filter
An MIT graduate’s 1979 idea, built on the way water clings to a curved surface, still shapes a gutter cover sold and installed by local dealers.
Jacksonville, FL
Before a Gutter Helmet inspector comes out to look at a house, the company asks the homeowner not to clean the gutters. The inspector, whom the company calls a Helmeteer, wants to see the clogs and whatever else has gone wrong. The fix is supposed to match the problem, and a freshly scrubbed gutter hides the problem.
The visit covers the gutters, the roof and the siding. The homeowner hears what the inspector found, asks as many questions as they like, and gets an estimate before the visit ends. If the job goes ahead, the old gutters stay up. The crew cleans, seals and adjusts them, then fits covers made to order for that roofline. The company says it can often finish in a day.
What goes on the house is a curved aluminum hood. Its story starts in 1979, when Bob DeMartini, an MIT graduate, began working on a gutter protection system. The first of his seven patents for the design was issued in 1981. The idea rests on a bit of physics most people have watched at a kitchen sink, and the company has stuck with it for more than 40 years.
That stubbornness is the whole personality of the brand. Gutter Helmet does not use filters, and it argues, at length and with some relish, that a filter does not stop a clog so much as move it a few inches higher.
The company tells its own origin story in an unexpected way. On its website it keeps a timeline of gutters that starts somewhere around 3000 B.C. with the Harappan civilization, in what is now Pakistan, and its drains covered with bricks of burnt clay. From there it runs through Roman roads crowned in the middle so water ran off into gutters at the edges, and Norman churches whose gutters ended in the mouths of gargoyles that spat rainwater clear of the walls. It notes a downspout put up at the Tower of London in 1240, believed to be the first in Britain, and the glut of salvaged lead that followed Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, much of it turned into cisterns, hopper heads and gutters.
In the American colonies, the timeline says, the usual gutter was two wooden boards set in a V and fastened with cast iron brackets or wooden pins. The timeline pauses to wonder whether George Washington ever cleaned his own. Metal rolling machines caught on in the early 1900s. Between 1960 and 1965 came machines that made aluminum gutters in one continuous piece, and in the 1970s portable versions that rode on a trailer and formed gutters at the construction site.
Then the timeline reaches 1979 and DeMartini, and 1981 and the first patent. Its last entry, labeled simply “Today,” is about the company’s customers. Gutter Helmet places itself as the next step after the one-piece aluminum gutter. Once gutters could be made in long runs on site, what fell into them was the problem left to solve.
The kitchen-sink physics is surface tension. The company’s explanation asks you to hold a glass under a running faucet and watch the water wrap around the outside of the glass instead of falling straight down. Rain running off a roof does the same thing on a Gutter Helmet cover. It clings to the textured surface, follows the curved front edge around, and slips into the gutter through a narrow opening. A Peoria, Illinois, dealer that installs the system puts that opening at 3/8 of an inch. Leaves, pine needles and twigs cannot make the turn. They slide off the edge and fall to the ground.
The details are where the patents live. The company lists a patented shape for that opening and a patented textured surface meant to handle heavy rain, snow loads and wind. Horizontal ribs stiffen the cover and spread the water across it. Underneath, heavy-gauge aluminum alloy supports carry the load, and the visible face gets a multilayer paint finish the company calls PermaLife, meant to resist fading and chalking. The covers go on over existing gutters. A dealer’s 2015 description of the product said it was made in America from a 99 percent recycled high-strength aluminum alloy.
For colder climates the company sells Helmet Heat, a self-regulating heating cable hidden beneath the covers. It adjusts its output to the temperature on its own, with no thermostat, and the cables are GFCI-protected so they cannot overheat. The point is to keep snow and ice from building up at the eaves, and to head off the ice dams, icicles and frozen gutters that can make a gutter sag.
The warranty is built around performance. The company promises that gutters under its covers will let water flow freely without clogging, and the coverage transfers to the next owner of the house. It applies only when a certified dealer does the installation. The system is not sold for do-it-yourself work, and the company says it will not work properly without professional fitting.
That requirement explains how Gutter Helmet reaches houses. The company makes the covers, and dealers around the country sell and install them. The dealer program carries no franchise fee, gives each dealer an exclusive territory, and includes on-site certification training. Some dealers run broader exterior businesses. Peoria Siding & Window, which has worked in central Illinois since 1976, also sells siding, windows and roofing.
The dealer network has produced family businesses of its own. Gutter Helmet by Harry Helmet, based in Millersville, Maryland, was established in 1981, the same year as DeMartini’s first patent. By 2015 it described itself as family-owned and operated, with Del Thebaud Sr. as president and owner. It served customers in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, western Washington and the District of Columbia. Along the way it had added gutter installation, replacement roofs and Helmet Heat, and in 2015 it was awarded exclusive rights to sell Sunesta retractable awnings in Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania.
In Jacksonville, Gutter Helmet of North Florida set out to expand its facilities. In 2022, the Florida Times-Union reported, the business received a city permit for a new 23,580-square-foot building on 1.62 acres on South St. Johns Bluff Road, a $2.3 million project with Bradley’s Construction Enterprises as contractor.
The brand’s best-known line is a registered slogan, Never Clean Your Gutters Again. The customers who come back are the ones who seem to believe it. A homeowner in Englewood, New Jersey, wrote in a review on the company’s site that her family had water in the basement for years until the covers went on, and none after. When the family later renovated and put up all new gutters, they insisted on reinstalling Gutter Helmet over them.
A homeowner in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had the covers put on his second-floor gutters more than 25 years before he wrote his review. He had come back to have the first floor done.