THINKING OF ADDING MORE INSULATION TO YOUR ATTIC? READ THIS FIRST.

If you’re tired of dealing with ice dams and you’ve decided to finally get your attic re-insulated, please read this first.  You might save yourself a lot of time and money.

Over the past two months, a large portion of my business has been ice dam inspections in Minnesota.   For most of these inspections, I was hired to determine the cause of the ice dams and to recommend a solution.

I feel extremely fortunate to have spent the past two months doing this.  During this time, I’ve dug through a ridiculous amount of insulation in attics.   I’ve come home with itching arms, neck, cheeks, and red eyes (I’m pretty sure fiberglass insulation was invented by a very evil person).  Most importantly, I’ve learned quite a bit about attics.

I’d like to share the complaints I’ve heard from homeowners, what I’ve learned, and what I’ve recommended.  My goal is to help homeowners benefit from my experience.

What I’ve Heard

I had more insulation added to my attic after last winter, but the ice dams are just as bad as they were last year, if not worse!

I heard versions of this statement over and over from frustrated homeowners.  Just adding more insulation typically won’t fix ice dam problems.  I’ll come back to this.

I just had a new roof installed, and the roofer said they laid down a rubber membrane going six feet up.  Obviously my roofer is a liar, because if they really had laid down a rubber membrane like they said, my roof wouldn’t be leaking.

I’ve heard so many versions of this!  The ‘rubber membrane’ that everyone refers to is actually an underlayment that’s commonly referred to as an ice and water shield.  This underlayment is required by the Minnesota State Building Code; it must be installed underneath the shingles and “extend from the eave’s edge to a point at least 24 inches inside the exterior wall line of the building.”  This stuff comes in a three foot roll, and roofers usually have to lay down two layers of it to get 24″ inside the exterior wall line, so it’s usually six feet.

Ice and water shield will not prevent roof leakage from ice dams. Ice dams can cause leaks above the underlayment, or even right through the underlayment; I’ve seen it happen.  According to Certainteed, the manufacturer of Winterguard underlayment, it “provides your first line of defense.”  It’s not a guarantee against leaks.

If you have ice dams and your roof leaks during the winter, don’t blame your roofer.  I can almost guarantee you that it has nothing to do with the way your roof was installed.

Why do I live in Minnesota?

This last weekend was a great reminder of why we live in Minnesota.  The temperature shoots up to 40 degrees and it feels like summer is around the corner.

What I’ve Learned

Gutters don’t cause ice dams. Ok, I always knew this, but I’ve noticed plenty of ice dams with no gutters this year.  Ice dams will show up whether gutters are installed or not.  I mention this because I actually heard a ‘professional’ guest on a local radio show say that gutters cause ice dams, and that homes without gutters won’t get ice dams.  I’m sorry, but that just ain’t true.  You should have seen me ‘calmly’ disagreeing with my radio when I heard this.

Ventilation has little to do with ice dams. I’m sure I’ll get plenty of indignant feedback for this blasphemous statement.  I’ve always been taught that you won’t get ice dams if you have enough ventilation, and I even used to preach this myself.  This is a concept that is deeply ingrained in the minds of contractors, roofers, and home inspectors everywhere.

Nevertheless, from all of the houses I’ve been to, I’ve seen little to no relationship between attic ventilation and ice dams.  Sure, attic ventilation is required.  Attic ventilation will help to cool the attic space, which helps to cool the roof decking, which helps to prevent snow melt, which helps to prevent ice dams… but this is a very small part of the equation.

The Minnesota Department of Commerce lists attic ventilation as a non-solution to ice dams.  TheUniversity of Minnesota Extension says that “only small amounts of roof ventilation are needed to maintain uniform roof surface temperatures.”

Adding more ventilation probably won’t change your ice dam problems.  Shoveling the snow off your roof vents probably won’t change your ice dam problems.

Adding more insulation to your attic probably won’t fix your ice dam problems. As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, I’ve been to a ridiculous number of houses this winter where insulation was added, but the problems didn’t go away.

If an attic lacks insulation, it’s probably an older attic.  Not always, but usually.  If it’s an older attic, it’s pretty much a guarantee that there are attic bypasses present.  Attic bypasses are passageways for warm air to get in to the attic, and they’re the driving force behind ice dams.  In almost every home that I inspected this winter, attic bypasses were at the root of the ice dams, regardless of how much insulation was present.  Through the use of an infrared camera, I’ve learned that insulation can’t make up for air leakage.

It doesn’t matter how much insulation is present in an attic; if there are air leaks, warm air will pass through traditional insulation.  The images below help to illustrate this; this was a very small attic bypass, but it still shows up plain as day through 14″ of loose fill fiberglass and another 4″ of cellulose on top of that.  I have hundreds of image sequences just like this.

Recessed lights are huge contributors to ice dams. I recently wrote about this in another blog - Recessed Lights Are Evil.

What I’ve Recommended

I’ve recommended the same thing over and over; seal the attic bypasses.  They’re the main cause of the ice dams.  When insulation has already been added to an attic space, this becomes an extremely difficult, if not impossible chore.  To access and seal the attic bypasses, you first need to know where they are.  When they’re buried under one to two feet of insulation… forget it.

An experienced insulation contractor might be good enough at their job to know where to look for most of the attic bypasses, and could spend their time digging through the insulation to find most of them, but without completely removing the existing insulation, there is no way to seal all of them.

In most cases, I’ve told homeowners that they can hire an experienced insulation contractor to seal up all of the attic bypasses that they can find, and to keep their fingers crossed.  This will probably be enough to prevent leakage from ice dams again, and it will be a good repair, but not complete.  For a complete repair, all of the existing insulation needs to be removed so all of the attic bypasses can be located and sealed.

If you’re going to have insulation added to your attic, be sure to seal the attic bypasses first.

Reuben Saltzman, Structure Tech Home Inspections - Email - Maple Grove Home Inspections

    

HOW TO PREVENT ICE DAMS

We’ve received over 34″ of snow in Minnesota in the last 25 days, which makes this the snowiest December on record.  While the snow turns our state in to a beautiful white winter wonderland, it also causes nasty ice dams that wreak havoc on homes like never before.

The heavy amount of snowfall and temperatures in the teens have been the perfect conditions to create ice dams.  Water leakage from ice dams is an epidemic in Minnesota right now.  I have friends, neighbors, and family members with water leaking in to their homes.  It’s everywhere.  I’ve taken all of the photos below within the last two weeks.

The two things that everyone wants to know is how to get rid of ice dams and how to prevent ice dams.  As I mentioned in a previous blog, the only completely safe and effective way to get rid of ice dams is to hire a professional ice dam removal company; they’ll use steam, which will completely remove the ice dam.  Anything else is a hack method.

The best way to prevent ice dams from forming is to address the three factors in your attic that contribute to ice dams; insulation, ventilation, and attic bypasses.

Attic Bypasses (air leakage)

This is the largest contributor to ice dams.  In almost every house that I inspect to determine the cause of ice dams, I find attic bypasses directly below the beginnings of the ice dams.  Attic bypasses are passageways for warmed air to enter in to the attic space, and traditional insulation won’t fix this.  The photos below show some common attic bypasses that I can find in just about any older house.

This first photo shows one of the largest and most common bypasses – the space around the furnace and / or water heater vent.  Sometimes these are huge. The one shown below is quite small.

In the photo below, you can see several holes in the top plate of a wall that were drilled for wires to pass through.  These holes could all be easily filled with spray foam, but finding these holes all over the attic would be a challenge without first removing the insulation.

With additions, the transitions between the ‘new’ and ‘old’ construction seem to always be sources of attic bypasses.  I had to dig through a lot of insulation to find this gap, but I wasn’t surprised at what I found.

When plumbing vents enter in to the attic, the space around the vents needs to be sealed.  This one obviously wasn’t.

Some older houses have whole-house fans that are designed to run on hot summer nights; these fans are gigantic sources of heat loss, because they’re usually not insulated or sealed up.  I took the photo below from inside the attic without a flash on my camera.  There’s some crazy heat loss occurring there, and as you might imagine, there was a huge ice dam nearby.

What makes most of these attic bypasses so difficult to locate is that they’re almost always buried in insulation.  Finding these buried air leaks turns in to an educated guessing game.  Lately I’ve been using an infrared camera while doing ice dam inspections, and I’ve found it to be very useful for finding these hidden passageways.

If you plan to have more insulation added to your attic, it’s probably a worthwhile investment to have all of the existing insulation completely removed and the bypasses sealed up before you re-insulate.  There’s just no way to find all the bypasses if you don’t do this.  If your home is over 20 years old, it’s almost a guarantee that you’ll have attic bypasses that need to be sealed.  It’s a shame that so many insulation contractors just add insulation on top of what’s already there without sealing the bypasses.

I also practice what I preach; I’m such a firm believer in removing insulation and sealing bypasses before re-insulating that I did this at my own house, my parents had this done at their house, and my sister had this done at her house.  It makes a big difference.

Insulation

This is a basic concept that everyone understands; you need insulation in your attic.  If there are voids in the insulation, they need to be fixed.

My first choice would be to have about two inches of closed-cell foam insulation applied to the attic floor, and then have several inches of cellulose installed on top of that.  The closed cell foam would seal up every bypass, and the cellulose would be a cost effective way to get the insulation level up to current requirements.  The drawback with this method is cost; closed cell foam ain’t cheap.

My next choice of insulation would be all cellulose insulation, with all of the bypasses sealed first.  I prefer cellulose to loose-fill fiberglass because it has a higher insulating value per inch, it seems to do a better job of stopping air leakage, and it’s not itchy fiberglass.  I’ve been digging through a lot of fiberglass covered attics lately, and my arms start getting itchy just thinking about it.

My last choice of insulation would be loose-fill fiberglass insulation… not that there’s anything wrong with it.  I personally just don’t like dealing with fiberglass.

What about fiberglass batts?  You know, those big rolls of fiberglass?  No way, Jose.  That stuff is impossible to install properly.  Fiberglass batts leave gaps all over the place that add up to an exponential level of heat loss.  I’m pretty sure that fiberglass batts are installed in attics exclusively by handy homeowners.

Ventilation

Having adequate ventilation for the attic space will help to keep the roof surface cold, which will help to prevent snow from melting, which will help to prevent ice dams.  The best way to ventilate an attic space is with continuous soffit vents and continuous ridge vents, but this isn’t always possible.

If you don’t have enough soffit vents, add more.  If you don’t have enough roof vents, add more.  You can’t have too much ventilation.  If your soffit vents are dirty, clean ‘em or replace the grills if they’re painted shut.  Grills are cheap.  If your soffit vents are blocked with insulation, you need air chutes installed at the eaves to prevent the insulation from blocking the vents.

When all else fails…

If you’ve already done everything you can think of to fix your ice dams but they keep coming back, or you’ve hired a contractor to fix your ice dams but they seem to be scratching their head a lot or coming up with a bunch of different guesses, call a home inspector.  We look at this stuff every day, and some of us even specialize in ice dam inspections.

In some cases, it’s not cost effective to control ice dams from inside.  Next week I’ll be blogging about controlling ice dams from the exterior.

Reuben Saltzman, Structure Tech Home Inspections - Email - Minneapolis Home Inspections

    

How To Prevent Ice Dams

After all the recent snowfall, it's a good time to talk about ice dams.  Ice dams are caused by the same thing I've been blogging about for the last several entries; heat loss!  The most obvious sign of heat loss in attics is ice dams - those huge masses of ice that build up at the edges of roofs.  Ice dams occur because heat from the house escapes in to the attic, warms the roof, and causes snow to melt.  When the water gets to the cold overhang at the eave, it freezes.  As the ice builds up, it literally creates a dam.  The trapped water can then leak into the home and cause damage to the roof decking, structural members, insulation, and even stain the ceiling.

   

To prevent ice dams from occurring, you need to stop the heat loss.  The best way to do this is to seal attic bypasses - you can read more about this in two of my recent blogs - Attic Photo Explanations and Insulation Vs. Air Leakage. The other two ways to help prevent ice dams are by having adequate insulation and ventilation.  Insulation will obviously help to prevent heat loss, and proper ventilation will help to keep the roof colder; the colder the roof, the less chance for the snow to melt in the first place.

Older one-and-a-half story houses are especially susceptible to ice dams because there is usually very little access to all of the attic spaces that need attention.  If this is the case, there are still some steps you can take to control the damage caused by ice dams.   The least expensive and most labor-intensive way to prevent ice dams is to remove the snow from the eaves using a roof rake.   It's best to remove the snow right away, when it's light and fluffy.  The longer you wait, the more ice will accumulate.  If you can remove the snow down to the shingles, the sun will usually keep the shingles warm enough to prevent ice from forming at the eaves.



If you're looking for a less labor-intensive method of preventing ice dams, you could install heat cables at the eaves.  These will usually prevent ice dams from forming, but electric heat cables are expensive and use a fair amount of electricity to operate, making them an environmentally UN-friendly solution.   Even manufacturers of heat cables state that they are not the most efficient way to solve ice problems.
The worst way of dealing with ice dams is to get on a ladder and hack away at your ice dams with a hatchet or ice pick.   This is dangerous, and you could cause damage to your roof.  I've seen many roofs with big hatchet marks in the shingles from people chopping too deep.  I don't recommend doing this.
The bottom line?  If you can't stop your ice dams the right way, buy a roof rake.

Reuben Saltzman, Structure Tech Home Inspections - Email - Minneapolis Home Inspections