Haven't had much use of it this month. Put it up when it hit 40°F in December. All melted in our rain lately.
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
266 points (99.6% liked)
Dull Men's Club
3363 readers
31 users here now
An unofficial chapter of the popular Dull Men's Club.
1. Relevant commentary on your own dull life. Posts should be about your own dull, lived experience. This is our most important rule. Direct questions, random thoughts, comment baiting, advice seeking, many uses of "discuss" rarely comply with this rule.
2. Original, Fresh, Meaningful Content.
3. Avoid repetitive topics.
4. This is not a search engine
Use a search engine, a tradesperson, Reddit, friends, a specialist Facebook group, apps, Wikipedia, an AI chat, a reverse image search etc. to answer simple questions or identify objects. Also see rule 1, “comment baiting”.
There are a number of content specific communities with subject matter experts who can help you.
Some other communities to consider before posting:
5. Keep it dull. If it puts us to sleep, it’s on the right track. Examples of likely not dull: jokes, gross stuff (including toes), politics, religion, royalty, illness or injury, killing things for fun, or promotional content. Feel free to post these elsewhere.
6. No hate speech, sexism, or bullying No sexism, hate speech, degrading or excessively foul language, or other harmful language. No othering or dehumanizing of anyone or negativity towards any gender identity.
7. Proofread before posting. Use good grammar and punctuation. Avoid useless phrases. Some examples: - starting a post with "So" - starting a post with pointless phrases, like "I hope this is allowed" or “this is my first post” Only share good quality, cropped images. Do not share screenshots of images; share the original image.
.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Bizarre. I live in a cold climate (Alberta) and have never seen something like this.
I've seen it lots. I live in Ontario.
The issue (ice dams) is caused by bad architecture, specifically the shape of the roof and/or the design of the house’s thermal envelope.
A properly designed roof should not have ice dams because the whole roof should get uniformly cold (below freezing) when the air temperature drops and the roof itself should not have any areas where meltwater can gather and refreeze.
My house violates both of these criteria. It has 2 different roof lines that meet at a right angle, resulting in a saddle point where tons of meltwater can gather. It also has a leaky thermal envelope that causes snow and ice to melt higher up on the roof and then refreeze in the gutters (which will always be cold because they hang outside the thermal envelope).
An ideal roof has a single roof line (think of a simple rectangular house with one peak in the middle) and the roof itself is raised several inches above a secondary plywood roof enclosing the insulation (with the thermal envelope inside) and ventilation allowing cold outdoor air to circulate between the two layers. This gives a pretty uniformly cold roof that maximizes drainage uniformity (no gathering of meltwater until the gutters). As long as the gutters and downspouts are free of clogs there should be no issues with ice dams.
Not a lot of people here use them, but it's not uncommon to see it on a businesses roof. Like a restaurant. Look around some time, you might be surprised. I'm in Wisconsin.
Hello fellow dull midwestern man. I've been needing to put some up on my roof but the ice dams haven't melted yet.
50-70s houses used shallower roofs. The adoption of steel plates in trusses in the 80s let houses have much steeper pitches to prevent this issue.
Some houses in the US Midwest are over 100yo so there's likely plenty of places that could stand to benefit.
I see this stuff in Ontario but pretty much only when somebody wants to clear the space above a walkway for safety reasons