Installation
Gutter Clips vs. Staples on Summit County Roofs
August 21, 2026
A staple gun is fast. That's the whole appeal. You can run a hundred feet of C9s along a fascia board in the time it takes to sort a box of clips. On a flat roofline in a mild climate, the staple holds, the lights look fine, and nobody thinks about it again until January.
Summit County is not a mild climate. A display installed in early November sits through five or six weeks of snow accumulation, wind off Dillon Reservoir, and a daily temperature swing that can run forty degrees between a sunny afternoon at 9,000 feet and three in the morning. The attachment method is the part of the job that either survives that or doesn't.
What a staple does to a wire over a Summit County winter
A staple works by compression. It pinches the light string's wire against wood — usually fascia, sometimes trim — and holds it there through friction and a little bit of crimp. That's a rigid connection. Nothing about it moves.
The wire, meanwhile, moves constantly. PVC jacket on a light string expands and contracts with temperature. Up here it does that twice a day, every day, from the day it goes up. Add the load of an inch of ice riding on the string and the wire is pulling against a fixed metal point that has already scored its insulation.
Two things happen. The first is mechanical: the staple crown saws slowly into the jacket. On a cheap string that can reach the conductor by season's end, and a nicked conductor in a wet snowbank is how you get a dark section — or a tripped GFCI on Christmas Eve. The second is that the staple itself starts to work loose. Wood swells and shrinks with moisture. Every cycle backs the staple out a fraction, and eventually a section of the run sags, catches snow, and pulls the rest of the line with it.
Then there's the hole. Every staple is two punctures in a piece of exterior trim that lives under snow four months a year. Multiply that by a few hundred across a roofline, repeat annually, and you're steadily inviting water into wood on a building where freeze-thaw does the rest of the work for free.
Clips move with the roof instead of fighting it
A gutter clip — and the related family of shingle tabs, ridge clips, and parapet or standing-seam clamps — hangs the light rather than pinning it. The bulb or wire sits in a channel. The clip grips the gutter lip, the shingle edge, or the seam. Nothing is punctured, and the connection has a small amount of give.
That give matters more here than most places. When a foot of heavy spring snow releases off a steep metal roof in Breckenridge, it comes off as a sheet. A stapled run in its path tears out, taking the wire with it. A properly placed clip run sits below the slide path or releases without destroying the string. Same principle in wind: on exposed ridge lots above Silverthorne and along the shoreline in Dillon, gusts work a line back and forth for weeks. A clip lets the string flex; a staple makes the wire the flexing part, right at the point where it's already scored.
Standing-seam metal rules staples out entirely
A lot of Summit County housing stock has metal roofing, for good reason — snow sheds off it. It also means there is nothing to staple into. The correct approach on standing seam is a non-penetrating clamp that grips the seam itself. No screws, no adhesive, no holes in a roof system whose entire warranty depends on not having holes in it.
Adhesive is the other tempting shortcut, and it fails predictably. Most exterior adhesives lose their grip below freezing, and up here the surface temperature of a north-facing metal panel can stay under 20°F for weeks. The clip drops in January, usually into a snowbank, and the homeowner finds it in May.
Where clips go on a mountain home, specifically
Attachment method is a per-surface decision, not a per-house one. A single Frisco roofline might use three:
- Gutters — an all-in-one clip over the gutter lip, oriented so meltwater and ice don't load the bulb socket directly.
- Shingle edges — a shingle tab that slides under the course, no fastener, no penetration.
- Standing seam and metal fascia — a seam clamp or magnetic-base clip rated for cold.
- Timber beams and log ends — common on lodge-style homes; these need a strapped or clamped solution rather than anything driven into the wood.
Spacing changes with exposure, too. A sheltered north Frisco street can run standard 12-inch intervals. A wind-loaded ridge property or a lakeside lot gets tighter spacing, because the failure point on a windy run is always the longest unsupported span.
What this means if you're planning ahead this summer
Clips take longer to install than staples. That's the honest tradeoff, and it's a real one in November, when usable daylight in Summit County runs out around 4:30 and the first heavy snow can close the install window without notice. It's also the reason the work gets scheduled early rather than squeezed in.
If you're a homeowner deciding how to handle this year's display, the actionable piece is simple: identify your roof surfaces before anyone climbs a ladder. Know whether you have gutters along the run you want lit, whether your roof is asphalt or standing seam, and whether the section faces the prevailing wind. That determines the hardware, and the hardware determines whether the display is still hanging straight in January.
If you manage a second home or a short-term rental, add one more item: staple holes in fascia are a maintenance cost that shows up years later as soft trim. Clips leave nothing behind when they come off in January.
Summit Mountain Lights is based in Frisco, and the crew has been hanging lights for more than fifteen years — long enough to know which clip goes on which seam. We design on-site, install with commercial-grade materials, service the display through the season, and take it all down in January. Tell us your address and roughly how many feet of roofline you're thinking about, and we'll put together a free estimate.