How to Remove Snow and Ice From Your Eaves Trough

Just received the following email
today:

Hi Ed

Is there a particular way to remove
snow from the roof when you have
eaves trough on your house ?

Thanks

Russell

Eaves trough. I had never heard this
term before this morning. Here's a
web page that says an eaves trough is
a gutter:

The Word Eavestrough

Most people in the United States say
gutter while many people in
Canada say an eaves trough to
mean the same thing. Apparently the
word eaves trough can also be
spelled as one word, eavestrough.

The writer of the above email has a
Canadian email address. I assume he
is from Canada.

I've written about gutters (eaves trough)
here:

How to Rake Snow Off Your Roof

I'm still not sure whether eaves
trough is singular or plural. Maybe
it is is both.

In any case, I'll play it safe and
use the the word gutters instead.
That's how most people in the United
States refer to the things that
collect rain and funnel it to the
Earth.

Looking around my neighborhood, I don't
see any houses that still have gutters.
I guess we were the last hold-out when
we removed our gutters a few years ago.

In a cold weather climate, I'd say the
easiest thing to do is to not have gutters.
They tend to collect snow and ice in the
winter and leaves in the fall.

However, when we did have gutters, I still
used to snowrake the roof. I would pull the
snow up and over the gutters. I'd try to
get the snow out of the gutters and
down to the ground. That's about all you
can do.

Of course, the gutters are going to collect
ice and snow regardless of whether you
snowrake or not. However, snowraking can
help eliminate the source of ice which is
the roof that sits just above the gutters.

If the roof above the gutters has less snow,
that means that less ice will collect in the
gutters. Less ice means less icicles.

It is characteristic of houses that are prone
to ice dams that they tend to have huge
icicles hanging off of the gutters. In many
ways, huge icicles hanging off of the gutters
and ice dams are the two faces of the same problem.

Both problems come from the same source which
is ice forming on the eaves after melting snow
re-freezes. However, it is easier to see icicles
forming than it is to see an ice dam forming.

Our house still has icicles but they are small
compared to what they used to be. This is for
two reasons:

1. We have removed the gutters
   on our house
2. We have added insulation to
   the attic

If I were to choose between removing
gutters and adding insulation to the
attic, I'd definitely add more insulation
to the attic. On the side of the house
where we never had gutters, we still used
to get huge icicles. In some cases, these
icicles would reach all the way to the
ground.

The icicles that used to form on our
house when I was a child always used to
fascinate me. As a child, it would never
have occurred me that the icicles would
go away, or become much smaller, if we added
more ceiling insulation.

This is exactly what has happened. Now
that our attic is well insulated, we
have almost no icicles on our house.The
icicles that do form are tiny and tend
to fall off in a few days.

The icicles that we used to have were
so beautiful. The sun would shine through
them and they looked like big long diamonds.
They would sparkle and shine and each icicle
had a different shape.

Life has its compensations. We've been
compensated for the lack of beautiful icicles
with lower heating bills and with no water running
down the inside of our big picture windows on
a warm spring day. I'd say this is more than
fair.

By the way: I'm really not an expert on gutters,
icicles, or roofs. I'm just a regular guy who
snowrakes his own roof and likes to write about
it.

Ed Abbott