ArmourGuard Gutter Guard Review

Audio Transcript:

Edited for clarity
Commentator: Johnathan Skardon
Audio from Ultimate Gutter Guard Challenge, Season 2024, Episode 24

This is ArmourGuard that we installed on the north side of the garage.

If you look at the May shot, at the top, you can see that the product is sitting pretty much flat inside the gutter. In fact, we had flattened this one. It was designed to install within the gutter.

It screwed in on the front lip; it had a little 90 degree bend on the back of it, and you would screw it to the front lip and then the fascia board on the back side of the gutter. It was also a five inch panel and we had a six inch gutter and, just to be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to take the gutter off and have to create a new gutter for the 5″ inch version of it in order to make it fit properly. I made the executive decision to add an extension piece to the rear portion of this gutter guard, which would then allow us to put it up at an angle and slide it up under the first course of shingles. 

I’m going to say right up front, had we installed it the way that we had received the product  — designed to install within the gutter — it would have performed just as poorly as the Valor system and just as poorly as our long-term tester, LeafFilter. It is designed to install relatively flat within the gutter. 

Even if you can get it up at an angle, it needs to be a serious angle in order for it to shed leaves and debris. By and large these products can’t get enough of an angle between where the gutter sits and where the roof line sits. 

Your best bet is to slide it up under the first course of shingles. Now, what is hopefully a surprise to us, anybody who is watching this, and especially if you are the manufacturer of this product, or an installer of All American Gutter Protection (ArmourGuard); if you put a panel on the back of it; if you put an extension piece on the back of this product, and you put it up under the shingles, it did a really good job. I was impressed by how well of a job it did with leaves and debris. It shed stuff really without any problem throughout the course of the year. 

Its ability to take in the water was also solid!

So this is a case where I believe one of the accepted installation methods is to slide it up under the shingles, put that little extension panel on the back of it, if they don’t make it long enough to slide it up under the shingles, and then let it be.

But, if you’re installing it within the gutter, you’re just not gonna get the performance that this one had. We essentially gave this product an advantage by changing the installation method, and I just want to note that up front.

So again, if we look at the top cover or top photo there, you’re looking at the May shot where it’s sitting flat. The locust flowers are falling off the tree in the beginning stages. Had we left it like that, it would have just filled up really fast. But what we ended up doing is, as you see in the October shot, there in the middle screen, you can see there’s a little piece of metal that kind of sits just below the shingles. That’s the extension piece that slid up underneath the shingles that allowed us to get it up at a nice angle.

Yeah, there are some leaves and debris sitting on top of it now but, by and large, that stuff couldn’t sit up there.  It was just loosely up there. As the winds came through, as the rains came through, it would blow off the top.

Now I will say that this screen was probably a little bit more porous than the GutterDome system, and we did have a few more instances of pine needles getting inside that [screen], which is, you know, not the end of the world, by any stretch, if you’re getting a few pine needles through here and there, but there were definitely some instances of the pine needles sticking into that screen and allowing some of those leaves to get stuck up there behind [the pine needles] as you will see in other videos.

However, with that said, it did a bang up job!

It was the 1st place winner [when] slid up under the shingles; 1st place in its ability to keep leaves and debris out of the gutters.

We might be able to extrapolate from this that if it sat flat in the gutter — like it was designed — like we received the product, that it also would have done the best job keeping leaves and debris out of the gutters. But we’ll never know because we slid it up under the shingles.

If you’re willing to slide it up under the shingles, it’s going to do a nice job keeping leaves and debris out. 

Congratulations to the Armour Guard system for that and its ability to absorb water!

It was always one that looked like it was working — you know — but sometimes it didn’t look like it was working. As it turns out, it came in third place out of eight [in the water test]. So it was more or less in the top third of all the systems — certainly in the top half. The fact that it’s keeping the leaves and debris out and that it did a decent job with the water, this is a system that you could certainly consider from a professionally installed perspective. 

It is manufactured, I believe, in Wisconsin under the name Armor Guard. It is available in a number of states from a company called All American Gutter Protection. It’s an extruded metal system. I believe it’s an offshoot [of a gutter guard called Gutterglove Pro]. I think [the manufacturer] licensed the patents from the Gutterglove Pro folks, so it’s not necessarily an original design. It’s a modification of an original design but, quite honestly, Gutterglove Pro was a knockoff of LeafFilter anyway, so whatever!

It did a nice job. First place for its ability to keep the leaves and debris out of the gutters and 3rd place for its ability to take in the water.

There was a negligible amount of debris remaining on the cover as you can see in that April shot on the right.