Winter Roofing: How To Deal With Ice Dams

If you happen to live in a part of the United States that gets very cold during the winter, you have probably had ice dams on your roof. Ice dams can cause problems that result in damage to your home. We’ll go over why these occur, and what you can do to prevent them from happening.

What Are Ice Dams?

Ice dams occur when melting snow flows from the top of your roof. The resulting water gets re-frozen at the edge of the roof.

This makes the water run down the length of your roof and get turned into ice when it reaches the areas that aren’t heated. An ice dam will grow in size as more water accumulates at the edge of the roof and becomes frozen.

If the problem isn’t dealt with quickly, it can result in horrible water damage to your home that will require emergency roof repair.

Preventing Ice Dams

The most effective way to handle these is to prevent them from forming in the first place. In order to protect your house from ice dams, there are various actions you can take.

Steps to Prevent Them:

• When there is a storm, make sure you immediately clear your roof after it passes. A roof rake is a good tool to use to take the snow off of your roof. Inspect your roof afterward to make sure that there isn’t a large amount of snow remaining.
• Clear out your downspouts. If you keep your downspouts clean, it will be easier for the melted snow to run down your gutters instead of piling up at the edge of the roof.

If these two steps are done immediately after storms, you greatly reduce your chances of creating them.

Removing Them

If you were unable to keep the ice dam from forming, you have to remove it as soon as you can. If you don’t, it will cause water damage. This can result in costly repairs later on.

• Go to your roof and push the ice dam off of your roof.
• Buy some calcium chloride and use it to melt the ice. The best way to do this is to pour the calcium chloride vertically along the length of the dam.

It’s important to deal with ice dams as soon as they appear. Otherwise, they can cause a lot of damage to your roof.