Ice Dam Season

It's what I like to think of as ice dam season in my neighborhood in Grand Rapids, after a month of freezing weather, with no warm breaks to melt snow off of roofs. Some people clean portions of snow off their roofs to keep ice from forming at the edge. Ice dams can build. Water pools underneath the ice, and can get under the shingles and leak down the walls inside the house. I've seen evidence of a half dozen of my near neighbors having used roofs rakes to try to preven this.

You can see the deck on the back of one of the homes has a shovel and brooms on the flat roof. The owner these is keeping things clean. You can see the beginning of an ice dam along the edge of the roof on the house next door, even though the roof is pretty clean.

Unlike the roofs you see here, most of mine is covered in about 5-6 inches of snow. I cleaned the snow off of the last three feet of my back roof this afternoon, and then used an axe to hack and chip off the start of an ice dam along the edge of the roof and gutter. With the warmer weather (just below freezing), water was beginning to form underneath the layer of ice.

Not much I can do for the roof on the front of the house. I'll use my roof rake, which extends about 22 feet, to clean some of the snow off the roof, but all I can do is hope that I don't get a bad ice dam.