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.
Fuck ICE.
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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Yeah, fuck ICE!
When it's being really stubborn you just have to climb up there and take an ice pick to the problem
I thought this was melt ice
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
I did this too last fall! Last winter we had ice dams cause water leakage to destroy the ceiling in our living room! Ice dams are no joke!
Somehow I've never heard of this and ive almost been clocked out by third storey ice chunks a few times
You've done a dam good job.
Thanks, dad.
How often do you run it to be effective? Is a cool idea
No, it's actually rather warm. The heat is how it works.
Daaad...
Fellow Dull Men, gaze upon the birth of a dad comedy legend.
So it really hasn't snowed much since I got it up. But, it takes a while to warm up. And it didn't get very warm after a hr and a half. It did work. Made little channels down to the edge.
Does it also work on rain?
No, not for rain. It's to prevent this (picture below). Creates channels for the meltwater to reach the edge and drip off instead of building up as ice.
Wow, thanks. Always wild to see those crazy us solutions which we handle totally different in Europe.
Never knew those things can be necessary.
(southern Germany based, we do have ice and snow here too)
does it also just cause the ice to slide off?
Not really, depends on how warm it is.
if the rain is frozen into ice.
As a Floridian, I had no idea such a device even existed. Neat! Thanks for the share.
You don't have gutters?
My house unfortunately has a few hysterical (historical) society rules. It's pretty old for the US.
Simple. Just run enough wires and at sufficiently high temperature to instantly vaporize all the rain that falls on your roof! I umm...hope electricity is cheap where you live...
Ah, similar to the Swedish K mark or more correctly Q mark
You're living in a famous person's house? Otherwise that is too far away from anything to be a historical site.
It's over 160 years old, the main part anyway. Around me it doesn't have to have had a famous person attached to it, just be old. Never seen "This Old House"?
Is that old where you are? My first house was built in 1875. Fairly similar age. For the US, I guess mine was kind of old.
...stateside historic protection typically kicks in at fifty years...
I find that difficult to believe. Where i live, almost every house and trailer is older than 50 years, and they get torn down all the time. Perhaps its different in different counties? My trailer is from the mid 1900's, it fucking sucks because you literally cannot get parts for plumbing.
they can ice over.
Seems like many here are unfamiliar with the solid form of water.
Dam, son.
Probably the worst winter to try this in tho, It has been 50-60 degrees here almost everyday lol
Why not use snow hooks?
Those wouldn't stop ice daming, those are to stop the snow from suddenly coming off the roof (and onto you).
Ice daming is caused by heat loss near the eaves that causes ice to build up and then "back up" under the singles as it forms and causing leaks inside.
The heat loss occurs higher up the roof. The lack of heat loss freezes it at the eaves.
Yes, I guess I should've said it's typically above the exterior walls where the heat loss happens and was trying to keep it simpler with just "near the eaves", but the melting from the heat loss is what makes the ice and you need the colder area lower on the roof to cause the freezing/daming.