Few sights inspire the heart and imagination like a winter wonderland of white snowscapes and elegant icicles. That joy may be short-lived, however, the moment you discover that ice has inhabited your gutters. Ice dams, accumulations of ice that block the passage of liquid water, can render your gutters useless until the next big melt. Let’s take a close look at this homeowner’s nightmare, including ways you can deal with it or even prevent it.

Does this sight look familiar?

The What and Why of Ice Dams

Why does this troublesome development plague your gutters? Roof warming can contribute to ice dam formation during the colder months. You might assume that your roof remains as cold as the rest of the home’s exterior, but you’re most likely wrong. Attic heat can transfer to the roof, warming it just enough to melt snow collected on top. The snow runs off toward the gutters, but not so quickly that the cold temperatures can’t turn it into ice en route. The next thing you know, you have ice dams clogging your gutters — and if you don’t do anything about it, you could also get meltwater infiltration of your roof shingles, potentially causing serious and expensive damage.

Treatment and Prevention

What can you do once ice dams have invaded your gutters? In this situation, first of all it’s important to know what not to do. For instance, do not go after your ice dams with a pick, trowel, chisel, or any other tool that might do more damage to your gutters (or yourself) than to the ice. Nor should you put salt on the ice. Salt won’t make an appreciable dent in most ice dams — and when the ice does finally melt, the salt will run straight down into your yard and garden, killing your plants. Your best bet is to freeze liquid-water leaks before they can develop into ice dams. Try blowing cold air from a high-power fan directly onto the leak. If your roof is topped with snow, get that snow off with a rake or other harmless implement before it can undergo the melting/hardening process into fingers of obstructive ice.

This might be over-reacting, but you get the idea.

The smartest strategy for fighting ice dams is to prevent them from accumulating in the first place. Obviously you can’t control what the weather decides to do — but you can counteract it with some high-tech help from smart gutter protection products.

One such item is a heated gutter guard, such as the Heated Helmet sold by Moonworks as a complement to its Gutter Helmet products. As the name implies, the Heated Helmet runs a heating element alongside the top of the gutter cover, keeping the edge of the roof warm enough for frozen precipitation to melt (or for liquid precipitation to stay liquid). This allows your gutters to fill with water instead of ice so they can continue to do their job effectively. You won’t have to worry about safety issues either, because the Heated Helmet is protected by a CFGI (ground-fault circuit interrupter).

Don’t let ice dams put up a barrier to your full enjoyment of your home when the mercury drops. Take appropriate action to keep that ice in liquid form and out of your gutters — and admire the beautiful icicles on other people’s houses instead!

(Images courtesy of Victor Habbick and ddpavumba /FreeDigitalPhotos.net)