When you made an ugly face as a kid (we all did), did your mother say, “Someday your face is going to freeze like that?” Yesterday as I was dealing with ice jams, my face did freeze, not because it was ugly but because it was so cold at gutter level on my roof, and my frustration level was at its max.
It all started Sunday as I was breaking ice on the roof above my deck. The ice was about ten inches thick and had crept up the roof at glacier speed about two feet. I worked with a carbon steel chisel and a three pound mason’s hammer and managed to break about six feet of the ice in two hours. The ugly face freeze happened when I realized I had about 175 lineal feet of gutter to go and a roof full of snow eighteen inches deep. There just had to be a solution.
Monday morning I called about twenty hardware stores looking for a roof rake to pull the snow down. That was a joke as people are standing in lines around here like they do at Best Buy on Black Friday just waiting to get one of the three hundred or so snow rakes that might come on the truck that day.
While I was on the phone, I was trolling my Facebook page and suddenly a friend’s friend posted a solution for ice dams on rooftops—calcium chloride in panty hose laid along the ice dam on the roof and in the gutter below. (Apparently ice-damology is a science of some sort here in Connecticut.) “It works every time.” “There’s a Youtube video about it.” The comments and likes in support of this kinky solution convinced me to try it. However, I was only going to do it after dark and on the rear roof for fear my neighbors might put me on some kind of watch list. By eight o’clock, I had two pair of one-size-fits-all taupe panty hose stuffed with ice melt stretched across my back roof. I must admit I was surprised at how far those things could stretch. They were like water balloons on steroids.
As far as the rake was concerned, I ended up making one. About eight years ago I bought a brass door threshold for my “next weekend project,” which fortunately never happened. I carefully unwrapped it and duck taped it to a garden rake. I taped the rake handle to a twelve foot tree trimmer handle and spent the better part of today pulling a couple of tons of ice and snow off part of my roof.
The jury is still out on the panty hose anti ice dammers, but my Rube Goldberg roof rake worked so well that my frustration has waned and my face has finally relaxed.
That's why the trick there is you should buy roof rakes by autumn and not during winter. It pays to do things in advance, you know. But I praise you for your resourcefulness. Making your own rake can be pretty frustrating, but you pulled it off! Good job!
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