ice, dam!

It's been a very snowy winter here in the northeast and now that we're on the brink of spring comes a new challenge.

In our neck of the woods the sugar-houses are busy day and night because this is the time of year that the maple sap runs.  Sugaring season happens when the temperature at night is below freezing and the temperature during the day is above freezing, thus allowing the sap to run out of the trees.  As the sap runs out of the trees, it's collected and then boiled down to make syrup.

I love maple syrup.  But a downside of this freezing and thawing in March is the formation of ice dams on the roof.  An ice dam usually forms when snow on the roof starts to melt but then refreezes.  It's a curse (damn!) because this ice builds up and prevents water from running off the roof.  Without being able to continue rolling off the roof, the water works its way back up under the shingles and down into the roof's substructure and on into the house.

There are a couple of ways to prevent ice dams.  The most basic way is to clear the snow off your roof before the thawing and freezing cycle begins.  Metal flashing along the lower edge of the roof also helps to limit ice dam formation because the heavy snow is apt to slide off, but that doesn't prevent the dam from forming behind the flashing.  This is also the case with using roof heating cables.

Before I left town for vacation, I didn't get a chance to clear the snow off the back roof and barn which both have a lower pitch than the front of the house.  I'm paying the price now. Serious ice dams formed on the back roof and on our return from sunny California, water was leaking into the mudroom.

The mudroom is a rustic-finished unheated room off of the kitchen.  The walls are covered in barn boards so the water damage is minimal.  Insides the walls is pink insulation.  Hopefully that has not become saturated.  Either way, I'm not going to rip open the walls to find out.

What I did do is go up on the roof, clear off the snow that covered the dams and then broke up the dams with a shovel.

Comments

[Mike]

Sounds just like my situation. The mud-room in my VT home has a shallow pitch and I huge dam formed. Unfortunately this location is right where a valley is so It's proven very difficult to break up (read EXTREMELY thick ice). Each day I try to knock some more off. At least I'm past the point where water was making its way in.

[jacs]

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