Friggin' Ice Dams

I think there is less leakage due to so much I & W being used. But..... due to over marketing and hype, some people think it is impossible for an ice dam to leak because I & W was used.

It's an underlayment with hundreds of holes in it (edited).

Grrrrrrr. :angry:

We got horrible ice in late Feb & March about two AND four years ago, if I remember correctly. Maybe you guys upstate didnt, but it was unbelievable!

Are them yards SOAKED enough for ya?? I spent part of the day building some extra pads for our dumpster.

Still getting calls about ice dams. Had one call today. Cleaned up 3 yesterday. Supposed to hit 50 tomorrow. That should bring an end to them. I don't ever remember seeing so much ice in March.

Lots of this type of work for us also. We're well hidden, so not swamped with calls, but still good for three or four jobs a day. Shovel off snow, cut in drain channel, treat with calcium chloride to try to hold the drain channel. Customers seem happy with the results. Going to get well below 0 f tonight, so calls have stopped until the next thaw . . .

A long day. We have another couple of buildings to do tomorrow. It is going to get really cold later this week(below zero again) and it is going to stick around. Better to have it off the roof than to have the buildings collapse. The plastic works slick. a lot easier than carrying the snow.

https://picasaweb.google.com/crookston.john4/HeritageHillsSnowPack?authkey=Gv1sRgCJ-4qIiE0PDXMg#5984162101779528146

Yeah man. A LOT WORSE than here OS. Our snow is 90-100% gone from the roofs

We went back today to finish and ended up doing about 4 more apartments. They had ceilings bowing and cracking under the weight. I believe at the top of the peak on the east side we were shoveling off about 30 inches of snow and it was so hard and dense that you could walk right on the top of it. That works out to about 50 to 55 pounds per square foot, and I believe it too, because when you got a full shovel it was heavy!! The problem is that in order to get the snow off from the top where it was thickest, we had to first shovel from the bottom to get to it. I will post some pictures next week, but the solution was to lay some plastic sheets on the roof from about 12 feet down from the top, after cutting a notch into the snow and stuffing the top edge into the notch to hold it. It stayed there nicely and we just shoveled the snow from the top of the roof onto the sheet and it slid right off the roof. Sweet!! A lot easier than carrying or pushing it all the way to the bottom. We still shoveled off about 60,000 pounds of ice and snow. I am sore.

Yeah I've heard Michigan is pretty bad. Much worse than Northern Indiana

I've chopped ice dams for 18 days straight. all by myself. usually 3-4 houses a day.

I use a wooden handled straight clawed hammer.

most of the 18 days was getting houses done and then going back and doing it again.

the weather was perfect for it.

sometimes the water ran out of the dams for 10-15 minutes, pouring 50+ gallons of water at a time.

That roof is 4/12 pitch so it doesn't slide. It just builds up and it was getting to be a LOOOONG way from where the snow was to the bottom of the roof. You have to shovel it three times, once to get it broken free and down the roof, once to get it the rest of the way to the ground and then you have the shovel whatever covers the sidewalks off when you get to the ground. There are pipes and roof louvers up there too, so you can't just hog it off. A snow blower would not do any good up there as hard as the pack it. A light plastic shovel and a lot of work is the best "tool" I have taken a piece of plastic sheeting onto the roof so that the snow can be thrown onto it and it will then slide off by itself. That is the next option on this roof. It goes where it wants to with that though and we would be challenged with shoveling more snow off the sidewalks with that method. Just too damn much snow.

Do you guys use those specialized snow removal tools such as the avalanche? I looked them up in December when we got our biggest snowfall, but I didn't want to wait on delivery.

I've about decided you have the true solution OS-----that roof with the sleeprs

There is a lot of snow on the roofs around here. Here is one we worked on today. It is hard when you have a long way to get it to the bottom of the roof.

https://picasaweb.google.com/crookston.john4/HeritageHillsSnowPack?authkey=Gv1sRgCJ-4qIiE0PDXMg#5982984025823579154

For the last few days I was going to comment on the large number of ice dam leaks that I have been getting but I didn't have time, too busy chasing around chopping ice. I've had 46 calls in the last week, all but 7 of them for ice dams. There were more calls where they didn't leave a message, probably trying to get someone out right away. I saw some real bad damage, ceilings fallen in a few times. Myself and one other guy dealt with 12 on Tuesday alone. Wading through snow thigh deep on the ground and on the roof makes for some exhausting work. Trying to make the money while it's there to be made. Come spring we are going to be busy trying to help people avoid these problems next year. A lot of them are not solvable except for heat cables. I kept saying all week "I'm too damned old to be doing this" But the money is good and I can use the exercise. Thought the warmup and rain that we just had would take care of the problems but there is still a lot of snow on the roofs and I expect that next week there will be more problems. But I won't have to deal with them because I'm heading south for a week. Going to see what the world looks like without snow all over everything.

My customer: "Oh nice, he's putting I&W water in the valleys, this won't ever leak"

This is fine if my customer would like to think that but...

Customer lost to hack: "Oh nice, he's putting I&W everywhere, this won't ever leak"

I can see how the average consumer would fall for it. It's used for problematic areas, so obviously IT solve's the problems. Marketing does it again.