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Mr. Luddite

On 3/22/2015 11:28 AM, wrote:
On Sun, 22 Mar 2015 10:53:19 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 3/22/2015 10:19 AM, wrote:
On Sun, 22 Mar 2015 03:11:21 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 3/21/2015 9:52 PM, Someone wrote:
True North wrote:
Finally took the Highlander out today for the first time since last
Saturday. We were getting short on grub.
Our Springer Spaniel has cabin fever....he runs circles around the
truck and looks at it..then me..demanding a ride.
City still in bad shape...no on street parking since Tuesday night and
our street is a narrow one lane. City still hasn't shown up to clear
the sidewalks. Expecting another storm tonight but should be 40mm of
rain.
Wife and I shoveled a path down the driveway to the back deck and
shoveled the 3 - 5 foot drifts off. We were afraid the snow would
absorb rain and exceed the deck's weight tolerance.
If we get another winter like this, I'll be trading the Toro electric
for a proper snowblower.

Snow absorbing rain? Where did you come up with that?

Rain soaked snow is a major cause of collapsed roofs and other
structures, especially when they are flat. Rain soaked snow is much
heavier than dry, powdery snow. During this past winter there were about
200 roofs or structures that collapsed in Massachusetts due to heavy
snow that became saturated with rain, exceeding the load design limits
of the buildings. Several were schools. Homeowners were constantly
warned to remove snow from roofs and flat structures to prevent this.

Rain saturated snow also lead to ice dams that can cause water to back
up under roof shingles, causing major damage inside houses. Don's
concerns are valid.

That ice dam thing is strange. I lived my whole life and never heard
of an ice dam and the last year I was in Maryland I had it.
It took me a while to figure out what was going on and even longer to
figure out how to get the dam cleared. Without air tools, I am not
sure how I would have done it, non destructively. (an air chisel does
wonders)

Most recommended way is steam. Melts the ice and doesn't destroy the
roof. Many of the sudden "professionals" that sprung up around here
were using hammers, air hammers and chisels. Not recommended.

We were fortunate. We had ice build up in the gutters but nothing backed
up under the shingles and into the interior walls and we didn't lose any
gutters. I think (but am not sure) that we have heater wires in the
eves. I know there's a ridge heater because there's a breaker in the
power panel for it and I checked it with a clamp-on ammeter and it was
drawing current. The reason I think there are also heaters in the eves
that run off the same circuit is because even though the gutters were
solid ice, there was still water dripping over them, even when the
temperature outside was in the single digits.

I swept off all the snow I could get at and then used the air chisel
to surgically cut some channels for the water to escape. Once the
water started moving during the day, the holes opened pretty fast.
It was a one day problem.
I had never seen it before and I lived in Md for 38 years.

Yeah, ice dams are not usually an issue but when you have as much snow,
and sleet that we've had (mostly in February) and then factor in
abnormally low temps, they become an issue. In all of February we only
had one day that the temp rose slightly above freezing. Most nights and
pre-dawn hours were single digits or zero and below.

The ice dams are created when heat escaping from the house attic melts
the bottom surface of the snow, runs toward the eves then re-freezes.
After a while it can't flow off the shingles, so it is forced back up
*under* them and leaks into interior walls.

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