Ice Dams On Your Home's Roof

Melting is a good thing, not always. Not when it forms an ice dam on your roof. <br/><br/>News on 6 reporter Steve Berg says ice dams can be a problem every winter. But it's going to be worse this

Thursday, January 18th 2007, 10:36 am

By: News On 6

Melting is a good thing, not always. Not when it forms an ice dam on your roof.

News on 6 reporter Steve Berg says ice dams can be a problem every winter. But it's going to be worse this time, because this ice is so unusually thick.

Tracie Ross has only been in her new house for 6 months and Wednesday afternoon, she got her first lesson in ice dams. "Noticed a few drops coming through the wood framing on our door, and it was just a constant, steady stream." She got on the phone with her builder, but there's not really anything he could do or should do. "It's nothing wrong with the house. There's just nowhere for the water to go."

Here's basically how ice dams form. The ice on the roof tends to melt from the bottom up, because of the heat from your house. The problem is that the water is still blocked by the ice above and has nowhere to go. Nowhere that is, except back into your house, dripping along walls or ceilings. "You can see it's all creased, and the paint's starting to come off where it's dripped through. But you can see how much water we got out of it, and that's from 3 or 4 hours or dripping."

Roofscapes of Oklahoma owner Clint Vaughn says a lot people don't realize you actually want your attic to stay cold during winter, which means keeping it well ventilated from the edges of the roof to the top. "You want that air to be passing up underneath, through your attic, and out the top. That will keep the temperature in your attic below freezing if its below freezing outside, which will stop the whole cycles with these ice dams to begin with."

If it makes you feel any better, even though he's a roofer, he has an ice dam at his house. You could try climbing up and knocking a vertical channel through the ice, but he doesn't recommend it. "You don't want to have a leaky ceiling, a broken arm, and a damaged roof."

So what does the roofer recommend? He says the safest thing is to wait it out and call your insurance agent and of course, keep those pots and pans ready.