I have a foot of snow on my roof and tons of icicles hanging from the eaves. I’m a bit worried about water intrusion as I’ve had some leakage through a windowsill. Would it be helpful or counterproductive to knock the icicles off? Or just completely pointless?
This is completely anecdotal, but I saw a local news story last winter about a couple of homeowners that had the gutters completely detach and pull away from the house, causing fairly significant damage, due to the weight of the ice accumulated in them. I’d knock the icicles off, personally.
Edit: Found the story. Just one homeowner in this one but I feel like there was at least one other story about this. Anyway: Columbus' Leading Local News: Weather, Traffic, Sports and more in Columbus, Ohio | 10tv.com
The icicles could contribute to the forming of an ice dam on your roof that will hold a pool of water that can infiltrate most roofing materials. If they are large already, you might not be able to break the ice at the top, so in that case it may not be any help. You should have used a rake to clear as much snow off the roof as possible before the icicles began to form. Just don’t stand under them if you knock them off. That could hurt. Also, if you can’t reach them from the ground, please have someone get a video of you falling.
I see what you did there.
Look on your roof (may need to get up on a ladder), to see if there is an ice dam at the edge, with a pool of water (or ice, on a cold day) behind it. If so, that is the problem symptom you need to fix. (The real problem is insufficient insulation in your attic, but that probably can’t be fixed until winter is over.)
The temporary fix for ice dams is to provide a channel through them, so that the water can flow off the roof. (Roofs are designed to shed water, but not to keep out a pool of standing water on the roof.) The easiest, cheapest way (but not the fastest) is to melt a channel through the ice with an old nylon stocking filled with rock salt, calcium chlorate, etc. Or hardware stores sell the equivalent, or hockey-puck shaped melters (at a much higher cost). Other ways to form a drain channel are shoveling or chopping one (can damage the roof, plus you can fall off the roof), melting one with a hose connected to your house hot water (can take a long time, use up all your hot water, and you can fall off the roof), or hiring someone with high pressure steam equipment to melt one (can cost a lot, and they can fall off your roof and sue you).
Icicles on the gutters are only a problem if they form part of the ice dam, and prevent meltwater from running off the roof. In that case, fix them while fixing the ice dam.
Otherwise, if they get too heavy, they can actually pull the gutters loose from the house, so you might consider removing them. But knocking them off has also been known to knock the gutters loose from the house, so you might consider leaving them there until spring. But melting icicles in spring have been known to fall and hit people – do you have a sidewalk underneath these icicles? Rather conflicting choices here.
Not just in spring. A few weeks ago I read that 14 people had been killed in Russia thus far this winter by falling icicles. It’s probably more by now.
In Russia, ice removes YOU!
I was knocking icicles from my house on Sunday, and I suddenly had a memory of doing it from the house I lived in when I was four or five.
Talk about your blasts from the past.
