Ice dams may depend on eavestroughs in the sense of hanging over them, but they sure don’t cause icycles. However, it’s still easy to get angry with the eavestroughs on your house, and blame them for the mess. But we still need to do something about ice dams, because they can end up costing us a deal of money, that’s an unavoidable expense.
- Mounds of ice hanging over put unnecessary strain on gutters and brackets.
- Ice damming up can damage shingles, and allow water to enter the roof.
- Icicles hanging over eavestroughs can injure a person below if they snap off.
If that’s sufficient reason to get you angry with your eavestroughs, you need to know removing them will not stop ice dams forming. You need to tackle the root cause, and that’s inside your house.
Tackling the Root Cause of Ice Dams in Calgary
Ice dams are snow melt that has thawed, partly flowed down a roof, and then frozen into ice. This happens when the roof surface is warm enough to melt the snow, but how is this possible in winter? It could not come from nature.
The answer is the heat drifts upward from inside the house. and it warms the shingles:
- A large part of the roof surface gradually melts the bottom layer of the snow pack.
- This melt slowly trickles down until it reaches the eaves outside the living space.
- There is freezes solidly. More melt continues to flow over it slowly building it out.
This process continues until the icicles can no longer withstand gravity, snap, and fall to the ground. This process would also play out if there were no gutters at all.
Three Ways to Prevent Ice Dams Developing
- Prevention is always the best option. If the heat from inside the house is causing the ice dam, then the situation could improve if we turned the thermostat down two degrees.
- However, if that were not possible, then the second option would be to seal the cracks in the ceiling the warm air is leaking past, and improve the insulation on top of the panels.
- But if the problem still persists, then the only option might be to improve the passive ventilation in the roof space in spring, to admit more cool air from outside.
There’s only one alternative left after that. Ask a decent roofing contractor to install heating cables on the roof above the eaves. This should however not be the preferred option, because you would be increasing the energy load on the building.
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