The joys of home ownership

[jducoeur]

We love the house dearly, but I think the honeymoon is over. This week, it developed its first real Problem.

Far as I can tell, the issue is ice dams. It looks like the front gutters have frozen solid, and they don't get much sun; the upper roof, however, does get a bit. So the melt comes down the roof, hits the gutter, can't get through it, and backs up into the flashing. Along most of the front, this isn't too terrible: it comes out the back of the flashing and runs down as icicles. Unfortunately, though, one of the things under that flashing is that lovely front bay window of ours.

So the past few days have been bucket-focused. Fortunately, the drips are well-behaved: there are about five distinct spots where it is coming through, and we've put big buckets under all of them. No significant damage from the drips yet, but the situation can't persist in the long run.

If the weather predictions come true, I suspect the problem will ease on Sunday -- it should get warm enough to melt the gutters, at which point I expect the worst of the problem to go away. But come spring, we'll have to look into a better solution. I suspect that will involve restructuring of that gutter, but I'm not sure of the details yet.

Oh, well. Compared to the old house (whose roof got ripped off in a hurricane, producing one of the worst weeks for me ever), this is pretty minor stuff. It's still a nice house, just showing the warts now that we've been in it a while...

Comments

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Our first instinct, but it doesn't appear to be the case -- there is no sign of drippage in the attic itself, only *below* the attic.

Well, yes. The snow melts high on the roof, and flows down (under the snow blanket) to the gutter, and encounters a dam there, and backs up under the flashing and shingles - and from there it finds the path of least resistance. If you stop the snow from melting high up, it cannot flow down to the gutter.

Which is not to say that your problem isn't with the gutter, but that a normal ice dam does not necessarily leak into the attic proper, so that isn't in and of itself telling.

[jducoeur]

Yeah -- that had begun to occur to me as a possibility. Given that the drippage seems to be continuing during the night (albeit much more slowly), that supports this diagnosis -- something has to be causing the melting, and it seems like that almost has to be attic heat. I'll need to look into that.

Pain in the ass if so, since we *are* doing what we thought was supposed to keep the attic cool. (The house came with an odd homebrew box that fits over the attic ladder, specifically to prevent heat leakage, but this may indicate that that's enough enough to prevent the problem by itself.)