Ice damming can result in water damage to your home.

When snow accumulates on a roof, it can melt and then re-freeze in the form of ice that creates a “dam” or ridge along roof edges.

This ice dam prevents snow and water from draining properly, allowing water to collect and penetrate roofing into the inside of your home.

Ice dams form on the lowest edge of a roof, and are caused by:

• Temperature Inside – Attic releases heat, which melts snow.
• Temperature Outside – Below freezing conditions re-freeze melted snow at roof’s edge.

NOTE: Ice dams are NOT caused by gutters. Gutters can, however, be damaged from ice damming.

The larger the ice dam, the more weight applied to your gutters. Ice dams can not only bend gutters but pull them down – affecting fascia, downspouts, fasteners, etc.

Ice Dam Prevention

In order to protect your home, it’s important to understand how damaging even small ice dams can be.

While large build-ups can be seen from the ground, you often can’t see smaller ice dams – around skylights, for instance. TX Roofing Solutions recommends a roof maintenance program for regular checkups.

To prevent ice damming, you can do the following, to help keep your roof cold and reduce melting and re-freezing:

1. Seal Up Your Attic

The biggest culprit leading to ice damming is your attic – the open air flow from your house to it.

Sealing your attic will not only help with ice dam prevention… it’ll cut down your energy bills, too. So go into your attic, pull back insulation, and “feel for” any incoming air through gaps and cracks.

Once you’ve located sources, use caulking or something similar to seal them up.

2. Use More Insulation

In addition to reducing air flow from your house, you can add more insulation to the floor of your attic.

This could be as simple as increasing rolls for added thickness, or using blow-in insulation to reach corners and areas hand-rolling can’t.

It’s inexpensive to insulate an attic, so we suggest professional service for guaranteed effectiveness.

3. Consider Ridge / Soffit Vents

Attic ventilation does just that – ventilate.

So installing soffit vents strategically will prevent ice dams from forming – by cooling both your roof and attic. Outside air is pulled in; warmer attic air is pushed out.

If performing this yourself, you can find more prevention tips here. Otherwise, we recommended you use the services of a professional roofing company – like ours.

NOTE: Do not manually remove – shovel / scrape – ice dams from your roof. This can be the quickest way to damage your roof and make costly repair a necessity.

The Euless Experts at TX Roofing Solutions

Have more questions about ice dams?

If so, please contact us so we can answer them for you. And if you are interested in our roofing services, including check-ups and/or maintenance, or are in need of help removing existing ice dams – let us know, so we can schedule your free on-site inspection.

Call us in Euless at (817) 726-1369, between the hours of 8am and 7pm, or send us a message by using our convenient form here. We will respond shortly.