How Winter Can Damage Your Roof

Your home’s roofing system is put to the test when winter arrives. Snow may look whimsical and harmless, but it can do real damage to your home’s roof, especially in adverse weather during the season. The first step to protect the roof, then, is to know what kind of damage it might experience.

In this post, AIC Roofing and Construction discusses two of the most common winter weather problems and how they damage your roof.

Snow Pile-Ups

A pile of snow sitting on the roof may look charming, but it can seriously damage your roof shingles and internal structure. Snow is surprisingly heavy when it has accumulated and it’s even more dangerous once the winter season ends as the packed snow will start absorbing water from spring rains.

Fortunately, this is one of the easier winter roofing problems to address because it only involves shoveling snow off your roof. Simply cleaning your roof once at the end of every week this season will reduce the amount of heft on your roof and make it breathe a little easier.

Ice Dams

Ice dams result from improper attic ventilation. Snow and ice naturally melt as a result of heat streaming out of your roof, but in this case, the heat doesn’t vent evenly throughout the roof surface, melting the snow only on certain portions. This runoff drips to the edges of a sloping roof, which is colder than the rest of the roof, and refreezes before it falls to the ground. The result is an ice dam, a solid mass of ice that adds unnecessary weight to your roofing system and gutters. It causes long-term structural damage, especially once the icicles start melting.

Prevent ice dams by properly insulating your roof and attic space. This makes the ambient heat from your home disperse equally throughout the roof. This has the added benefit of preventing snow from accumulating on the surface of your roof as well.

Give us a call to learn more about how AIC Roofing and Construction can bolster your roof’s defenses against winter weather damage. We offer complete roofing services throughout central KY.

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