The snow is supposed to start around one this afternoon, accumulating up to 4 inches, followed by an inch or two of ice. That's if we're middling lucky; shift the storm track a few miles one way and our luck impoves to six inches of snow; shift it the other way and we get a king-sized ice storm.
Roll them dice -- even if you win, you're still stuck in the game.
Meanwhile, our existing snow and ice is hard at work:
Ladder-line doesn't like this. The kiloWatt hams have a fix for it....
On the other side of the house, this big fella was over 6' 6" at mid-afternoon.
And back to the South side, the full problem is revealed. Yes, the gutters have frozen solid and overflowed. (In the foreground, runner-up to the Great Big Icicle contest.)
The meteorologists claim we'll see fifty degrees before this week ends. I'm not looking forward to a too-rapid thaw.
7 comments:
Are you using automotive heater hose for your ladder line spacers?
Frozen gutters quickly lead to ice dams. Major problems follow. Pls get some heat tape up there to melt it before your whole house floods.
Yes, it happened to us a few years ago.
HTH
Roberta, you probably already know this, but I'll post it anyway, since you won't be the only one reading it.
The cause of ice dams in the gutters is insufficient insulation on the attic floor, combined with insufficient ventilation of the attic itself. Heat thus rises from the house to the roof, where it melts the snow. The water rolls down to the gutters, where it is removed from the heat source and re-freezes.
The cure isn't heat tape in the gutters. That's a band-aid on the symptoms. The cure is much more attic insulation and much more attic ventilation. This keeps the roof cold, such that the snow doesn't melt into the gutters.
This was astoundingly evident where I used to live in the mountains. The older houses with poor insulation had icicles, while the newer houses with cold roofs didn't.
My apologies, but I thought it needed saying.
My power was off over here in Springfield when I left the house. It's warming to above freezing this afternoon so it is going to be a sloppy mess. The roads already are.
You're not the only one that doesn't want to see a rapid thaw this year. I'm about 200 feet away from the mighty Eel river, this is the first time in the about 25 years I've been here that I've been concerned about the spring thaw.
There's an old feed mill dam about 2 miles down stream from here, I'm already envisioning an ice jamb down there holding up the run off from about 3-1/2 feet of melting snow.
As near as I can figure, this house was *intended* to do something like this: the outer walls are open from the basement to the attic and there are very small slits at the roof overhang. Back when the basement housed a toasty, inefficient coal-burner, there was a pretty constant warm air flow.
When I bought the house, I carefully re-insulated the semi-finished portion of the attic, about half as wide as the house. This leaves small, spaces, triangular in cross-section, running full length of the house, with insulation on the "floor" (ceiling of the room below) and wall (hip wall of the finished attic). The roof has a nice thick snow pack -- more than most of the neighboring houses -- and the melting is just at the overhang. So it's a little hard to predict how this will play out as the temperature goes up. The lower section *should* melt away first.
I'll give Denver this much-we don't get a lot of freezing rain, and 3 cloudy days in a row is considered whine-worthy.
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