Ice Dam Removal

Ice Dam Removal Ice Dam Removal Ice Dam Removal

Ice Dams can cause serious damage to your home by forcing water to back up underneath your shingles and into your home. We use steam to remove ice from roofs. Steam is the only method to safely remove ice without damaging your roof or gutters.

Protect your roof and home from the hazards of ice dams and improper removal methods. When ice dams are threatening your home or business, call us.

What is an Ice Dam?

When snow accumulates on a roof, a cycle of melting and refreezing occurs. In a perfect world, the snow would melt off the roof, enter the gutters, and flow harmlessly to the ground. Or the snow would evaporate from the action of the sun, and never really melt off unless the outside temperature rose above the freezing point. However, two key factors interact to cause problems... the outside temperature and the temperature of the inside of your attic.
Ice Dam

The warmer your attic is, the more melt off that occurs at the roof surface. This melted snow would normally flow off the edge of the roof. Under certain conditions, though, when air temperature is very low, the water refreezes at the edge of the roof, where the interior roof surface is not being warmed by the attic. This refreezing gradually forms what is fondly known as an "ice dam", a growing heap of ice that blocks path of the melted snow.

Once this dam forms to a certain height, the melted snow that pools up behind it can suddenly leak back under the roof shingles and into your home! On a roof with a low slope, it only takes a small ice dam to cause water backup and leakage.

Contrary to popular opinion, gutters do not cause ice dams. However, an ice dam can extend into a gutter if weather conditions permit.


Prevention

The two options are insulation and ventilation.

Insulation - Since we have determined the main cause of ice dams to be an overly warm attic, a good start in inoculating your home against ice dams is to reduce the attic temperature. Installing additional insulation on the attic floor is as easy as laying additional batts across the existing ones, or having more insulation blown in.

However, there are limits to the usefulness of this procedure... regarding Murphy's Law of diminishing returns. Once you reach the your area's optimal R-value (a measure of the insulating value of a material), further increases in the amount will not show appreciable decrease in heat loss per dollar spent. Visit Owens Corning's web site at http://www.owenscorning.com for more information. They have state by state listings of insulation standards and recommendations... the most thorough listing I have found anywhere.

Ice Dam Install weatherstripping and/or insulation on attic stairways or hatchways, and on attic floor-mounted louvers for whole house ventilation fans. Be careful if there are any exposed recessed light fixtures or vent fans poking through the attic floor. Some of these are not designed to be covered with insulation. Get some information from the manufacturers on the suitability of covering them!

Ventilation - Even with optimal insulation, there is still heat leakage into the attic. This is where the value of ventilation becomes apparent. Without adequate ventilation, heat will build up regardless of the amount of insulation. (As an added plus, ventilation removes water vapor also, which can condense in the attic and cause dry rot on wood and rust on metal items.)

Increasing ventilation can be a major or semi-major project. The usual recommendation for venting is 1 square foot of vent for every 150 feet of attic floor area. Most older homes don't even come close to meeting this number. If you have small louvered windows at either end of the attic, known as gable vents, you may be able to replace them with larger ones. This will take some carpentry skills, but is not a really tough job unless you have difficulty getting to either the inside or outside of the windows.

If your house's roof overhangs the outside walls, add vents into these overhangs (soffits). To complete the ventilation system, add a ridge vent. This is a specialized form of vent that mounts along the length of the peak of the roof. Cold air entering the soffit vents rises along the inside of the roof and exits through the ridge vent, cooling the roof and removing moisture (that important fringe benefit) at the same time. This is the best form of ventilation, but cannot be fully utilized without the soffit venting. However, I would still recommend the addition of ridge venting into any home getting a new roof. Even without the soffit vents, the action of the ridge vent will lower the temperature and reduce moisture in the attic somewhat, in conjunction with the gable vents.

What do we do?

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