Every January, our phones light up with the same Park Ridge call: water stain spreading on the ceiling above the bay window, ice teeth two feet thick at the eaves, and a homeowner who's tired of dealing with it. Ice dams aren't bad luck. They're a predictable outcome of how a lot of Park Ridge homes were built — particularly the brick bungalows along Dempster, the Cape Cods west of Cumberland, and the older Tudors with shallow-pitch eaves around Hinkley Park.
An ice dam forms when warm air leaking from your living space heats the underside of your roof deck. Snow melts on the warm upper roof, runs down to the colder eaves, and re-freezes — building a wall of ice that traps the next melt cycle behind it. Water sits, finds a nail or a flashing edge, and starts coming inside.
The fix is rarely as simple as 'install a heat cable.' Heat cables are a band-aid that often makes the problem worse by creating uneven melt patterns. The real solution attacks three things at once: air sealing the attic floor so warm interior air stops reaching the deck, increasing insulation depth to slow conductive heat transfer, and balancing intake and exhaust ventilation so cold outdoor air flushes the attic and keeps the roof deck temperature uniform.
On most Park Ridge bungalows we treat, the soffit intake is the limiting factor. Stock bungalow soffits weren't designed for modern airflow standards — they choke the system before the ridge vent can do its job. Retrofitting continuous intake at the soffits, paired with a properly sized ridge or exhaust vent, dramatically reduces ice dam recurrence.
If you're already in the middle of a leak: don't climb on a snow-covered roof with a hammer. Steam removal is the only safe way to clear the dam without further damaging the shingles. Call us — we'll triage and recommend a steam removal company or come out ourselves depending on the situation. Then, when the snow's gone and we can plan properly, let's address the cause so next January doesn't repeat.