Ice dam prevention time!

The neighbors must think I'm a bit nuts for how often I rake snow off the roof. At least that's what I thought until I saw the guy across the street actually climb up on his roof in January with a shovel and start shoveling it off. I use a very long roof rake to clear snow and I stand on the ground. Getting up on an icy roof in January in New England strikes me as suicidal, but anyhoo...

When the weather is super cold, there's really no point in clearing the snow off the roof because it forms a nice, solid icy barrier. This is actually a handy type of insulation...but when things start to thaw, that's when the ice dam beast can appear. By that time, it's impossible to clear the snow off the roof because it has hardened to a solid icy mass. Even if you did chip away at it, you'd likely start hacking off roof shingles along with the roof, throwing out the baby with the bathwater as they say. So you gotta rake the snow off the roof when it's nice and fluffy. Otherwise, you're screwed come spring or that ever unpredictable February deluge of 3" of rain and 60 degrees (followed by another month of temperatures in the teens of course--welcome to New England).

So my advice is: roof rake early and often. Gently bash ice and snow out of the gutters whenever possible. You'll get no payoff (other than huge triceps) until it starts raining when you have a foot of snow on your roof. If you have a uniformly steep roof, you can probably safely ignore my advice. But if you have a very bungalow-y roof, with lots of changes in pitch and some relatively flat roofs, go get a roof rake.

We have a few feet of snow on the ground and the forecast calls for about 2" of heavy rain in the next few days. Here's when I get a bit bonkers, trying to clear yet more snow off the roof, running around outside, digging the downspouts out of the snow and trying to dig little snow trenches so that the roof water will drain away from the house.

It's great exercise. Kettlebells are a good workout for snow shoveling and roof raking. I'm hoping the effort pays off and we don't see any rain in the basement.