With the holiday season just around the corner, it is time to embrace the celebrations and joy that this time of the year brings to the table. But if you live in an area that sees snow during the holidays, the celebrations also call for caution from ice dams.
If you don’t pay attention to ice dam prevention before the holidays, you may have to deal with the scarce availability of roofing specialists and sky-high costs for repair jobs. These factors can lead you to a rude awakening when it is too late to repair the damage in the middle of the season.
To help you save your time and money, here’s how you can move forward with preventing ice dams during the holiday season.
If you are looking for help with ice dams and seek to prevent ice dams on your roof, reach out HotEdge today. Our team will certainly look at your roof surface, assess solutions such as heating cables, add energy-efficient components and work with you to eliminate ice dams.
We know how dangerous ice dams can be and do our part to look at inadequate air sealing, energy costs, attic insulation, melted snow water, and more.
Check Your Roof Insulation
Just before the holiday season spreads its icy wings, you must move forward with checking your roof insulation. Since ice dams mostly form due to poor insulation, this simple step can prevent them to a great degree.
You can check your roof’s insulation all by yourself by looking for drafts and cold breezes under and over your roof’s surface. A sudden change in temperatures from your residential floor to the attic can also indicate poorly insulated roofing.
With that being said, you must get this checked out by a professional for proper assurance. This step ensures a thorough inspection and leads to required insulation and sealing without any delay.
Clean Your Gutters
Before freezing temperatures descend upon your home, you must get your gutters cleaned out. It ensures that any melted water or ice chunks from your roof can go straight down the gutter’s structure instead of getting blocked and turning into a bigger formation of ice.
In addition to ensuring the flow of melted ice water, this particular step also helps prevent icicles that could hang from your gutter system. It lets you stay safe from the overhead hazard as you move in and out of your home.
If you have a ladder and household tools, you can clean your gutters by yourself. From there, pouring some water from the tap can help you determine if it is flowing through the downspout correctly or if you need any professional maintenance.
Rake Your Roof
Once the snow season starts in full force, you are way past the preventative timeline of repairing the insulation and cleaning the gutter. However, you can still take one prominent preventive action in the form of raking your roof.
When you rake your roof after a particularly heavy snowfall, you can ensure to take excess snow off of the surface of your roof. This simple practice lowers the chance of the remaining snow turning into ice dams. Due to this reason, it is one of the top ongoing prevention measures that you can take as a homeowner.
When raking additional snow off of your roof, make sure that your gutters are also clean from any debris. It allows any chunks of snow to melt and flow through the downspout without any issues.
Check for Ice Dams
Even after performing all of these actions, ice dams can form on your roof. Due to this reason, you must keep an eye out for ice dam formation, especially after heavy snow.
Most of the time, you can spot these ice dams right from the ground or your front lawn. Sometimes, you may need to climb up a ladder to see their formation in real-time. If there’s snow on the ground, you need to be careful about this step.
But as soon as you notice ice dams forming on your roof, it’s important to call a professional right away. It makes sure that you can get experts to remove the ice dams through professional tools and practices. While it takes some time and money, it saves you from larger expenditures.
Install Ice Melt Systems
If you want to prevent the formation of ice dams for good, you can look into ice melt systems. These electric-powered systems often use thermal cables. But some of these solutions also come in the form of panels.
While panel-powered solutions are practically more functional, cable-only solutions are also popular. With that being said, either solution calls for sufficient investment in terms of the initial installation. These solutions also require you to pay for power bills according to their usage.
That said, looking for a suitable solution can cut your installation and power expenditure by a large margin. In turn, this ice dam prevention technique can save your time and funds that are otherwise spent on ice dam removal.
By following these suggestions, you can steer clear of extensive ice dam removal measures during the holiday season. It not only helps you stay away from throwing significant funds into these removal jobs but also allows you to spend more time with your loved ones.
Contact us at HotEdge Today
If you are looking to prevent ice dams and notice that you have a regular snow-covered roof, then ensure to work with a competent team today. Whether you are looking at preventing ice dams now or that of future ice dams, our team at HotEdge can certainly work with you.
To see how HotEdge can help you against ice dams, don’t hesitate to contact us for a free quote today. We will be glad to understand your concerns and provide you with the perfect solutions right away.
