Just Grumbling About A Roof Leak ....

How does that pergo hold up to the water?

Same thing happened to us after adding our living room addition. I spent a while up on the roof melting and chipping the ice dams out. The next summer I added heat trace. Now it costs $20/mo in electricity, but no leaks!

Salt "pucks" can help with ice dams.

Throw them up on the roof uphill of the ice dam. It melts its way down through the ice dam and starts the water flowing.

Ice dams suck.

I've used regular road salt to melt a channel when I had ice dams. But they sell puck sized/shaped chunks of salt just for roof ice dams. Other alternative.....a long sock filled with salt.

In the future, you don't need to rake the whole roof. If you can pull the snow off the eaves that can often be sufficient.

Yup, that's the stuff

Yep. Agree w woodgeek on the sock full of salt.

Only down side of raking just the low eve is that it may just move your ice dam further up the roof, depending on the personality of the house. I've seen this go really bad as many roofers will put an underlayment at the bottom 3 or 6 feet of the roof, it'll protect against 90% of ice dams or better, move the dam above the underlayment and your drip just went to a steady stream.

Pretty impressed that pergo is holding up! I've seen it go bad from refrigerator condensation, and even from excessive humidity (over 80%).

Make sure to poke holes in the sheetrock to get the water out of there. I would also run fans up into the area to keep it as dry as possible.

If its an ice dam, I second the heat trace. Very easy to install and I don't shovel my roof anymore.
I bought this kit from amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Easy-Heat-ADKS-1000-200-Foot--Icing/dp/B000FKF6HM/ref=sr_1_1?s=lawn-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1422639138&sr=1-1&keywords=Easy heat cable

Anytime its snowing, i leave it on and that is usually enough.

Now, the root cause is poor insulation or areas that are leaking heat from the room to the roof and melting the ice. If you are pulling the ceiling anyway, add better insulation and look for areas that could be leaking heat to the bottom of the roof.

Doing The Dixie Eyed Hustle said:

Fans & dehumidifier running.

Inside leak has stopped. Roof almost clear.

I'm thinking the heat in the chimney ( the PE resides in said chimney ) might have something to do with this issue, as the chimney is literally 6 feet from where the leak started, and 10 feet from the from windows?



Got home early to clean up before everything freezes tonight, and knocked off the forming icicles. Literally opened up the flood gates off of the roof.

Note the chimney, and the 2 windows to the left of the front door, this is where the issue is.


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Sounds correct. The issue is the roof is getting to hot enough to melt the snow. It runs downhill and freezes before it runs off the roof. Have you added any insulation in the attic? You need space between the ceiling insulation and the roof.

I agree, you have a heated attic from the chimney and cold soffits. Its going to be tough to ventilate the attic to maintain it uniformly cold so you may have to look at going with a "hot roof" and have the underside of the deck spayed with foam top to bottom. What do you have for ridge line ventilation? The addition the to right of the house looks higher than the house and may have blocked any sort of gable end vent and its doesn't look from the photo that you have ridge vents. It may just be that you don't have enough attic ventilation. With a conventional insulation system, the attic needs to be the same temperature as the outdoors and the combination of the lack of vents and the chimney may be adding up to warm attic.

If you cant get the temperature down in he attic space then the alternative is to deal with the ice dams. There are two methods, strip the roof back in the spring and install ice and water shield under the shingles for about 10' from the edge of the roof and remove the gutters in the winter or install heating cables. Some folks go crazy with heating cables, All you really need to do is get the water flowing in few spots.


Heating cables will also work if you don't mind the bill.

Yikes. If the attic floor were properly airsealed, then there will be no ice dams. She can hire a pro to do the work, and energy savings will pay for the job in 5 years or less.

No need to touch the roof. The problem is heat coming up from below around the insulation.....there could be a few big openings in the framing that a handy man could fix in a couple hours (most houses were built with large air leaks), and voila....no more ice dams.

We also had a slab patio added in the 70's to our house. Fortunately, we needed a new roof in 2010 when we bought the place and found the hack job they did in adding the patio roof. We needed to replace 3 skylights in the patio too. So our carpenter rebuilt the transition properly, but it was bad before, leaked every time it rained.

Allow me to commiserate. Been in my house 13 years and this winter is the first time we've had ice dam issues or any leaks. This leak popped up a few days ago and it is located next to the chimney.

I'm planning on sealing the attic, adding insulation and ventilation. Should I also insulate the exterior of the chimney that travels through the attic to reduce heat loss into the attic? Or would that be unsafe?

I would,,,but i'm not sure off the top of my head which insulation to use. Is the chimney properly flashed? Old roof tar?

Look for other sources of heat and other insulation gaps above the ceiling.

I use to believe that stuff about poor attic insulation being the cause of ice dams, but a couple years ago we had some heavy snow falls, although no heavier then some previous years, and a lot of people were getting ice dams and water leaking into their homes. The thing is one of my neighbors had just finished building a large garage/shop on his rental house two doors down. I watched them shingle the roof and they did everything according to code, including putting down a proper roofing membrane on the roof before laying the asphalt shingles, and the roof still developed an ice dam which led to a leak where the water somehow got under the shingles and membrane and down the side of the stucco wall and froze again as sheets of ice on the exterior wall, but the thing was, this garage was NOT heated, so there was no way that the damage could have been caused by heat infiltrating through the attic.
The only explanation I can come up with for this, and many of the other related roof leaks that happened that winter on many other homes, is just the right (or wrong) set of freeze thaw cycles that led to this ice damming and water leaks.
Personally I had no problems on my house that winter because I have a steep pitch metal roof and all the snow slid right off.

Lots of roof.com sites out there folks, so I guess brotherbart will be closing this thread right away anyway.