Posted on 03/04/2014 7:31:15 AM PST by AngelesCrestHighway
I think you have to be drinking when you do it to have it work effectively.
My neighbors have ice dams all over their roof. They haven’t figured out why they have them and we don’t. lol
Yup. I did that once. Got a nice face full of Freon for my efforts. It's oilier than I would have guessed. The really bad part is it wasn't my fridge. I had to buy the guy a new one.
tries to burn the old Christmas tree in the fireplace.
People often say stupid should burn.
This is one case where it appears to have actually happened.
Or a flathead screwdriver. Never mind how I know.
The problem with the equipment is that it is pretty easy to use. Mine attaches to a regular propane tank, and you light it with one of those metallic spark devices, like the one the teacher used to light the Bunsen Burners in chem class. Once it’s lit, it becomes a very mechanical operation, like shoveling snow or raking leaves. You have to concentrate to remember that you have a potentially deadly device at your fingertips. The hose that connects the propane tank to the flamethrower is about 6 feet long. It wouldn’t take much imagination to burn through the hose and ignite more of the propane than you had in mind.
The common theory on ice dams is heat from the house melts the snow, it flows down to the cold eaves and freezes.
But there are other causes as well. We had a house with a sun room covered by a shed roof. The crawl space above sun room was extravagantly insulated and had big vents on either end to outside. That space was exactly ambient air temperature.
But, In Nov - March the sun on the lower half of the roof was blocked by the neighbors house. The sun, hitting the black upper roof would melt the snow and freeze when it got to the shaded portion. In march when the sun hit the whole roof again, no problem.
So the only solution was to keep the shaded are shoveled, after every snow.
There were some maintenance workers in Austin who did that during the last big freeze.
BTW, I loved the old cowpoke jokes.
Must be a “Dragon” — I’ve looked into buying one to get rid of stubborn weeds, seems like a good idea. No chemicals, just good clean flames and the weeds are gone instantly. I never thought for a moment about using it to melt ice. It might be dangerous in knucklehead hands ... you could set your house on fire, or your dog, or the mailman. Yike!
Look - it’s just that time of winter when it doesn’t sound like a bad idea. You get crazy. I stopped taking a double-bit ax to my sidewalk ice when a little voice told me it wasn’t an altogether intelligent thing to do.
And I think it was a squirrel.
That is understandable with all the snow the midwest and east coast has gotten...Gotta get out and do something!
Heat tapes, salt, and hot water are some of the things that I used to use when I lived in the snow country.
Salt is nasty on trim though. So, about the only thing that really worked was to melt holes through several places along the thing to let the water drain. That and get up there and shovel off the roof. But, I have seen people shovel upwards taking off their shingles. The one place to pay attention to, is where the chimney comes out of the roof. That and vent pipes.
I’ve tried a torch for an ice dam and a kerosene torpedo heater for a snow bank at the end of the driveway. What can I say? I’m a big time tinkerer. Didn’t take long in both cases to realize that cold beats heat.
In this case, the primary problem is they just don’t bother to ever clean out their gutters.
This house didn’t have gutters, on that roof. That was the FIRST thing I got rid of.
Having played around with various thermal methods of melting driveway/sidewalk ice, I am reminded of some basics from high school physics:
1) Temperature is not the same thing as heat.
2) “Heat of Fusion” is huge.
3) Pure water freezes at 32F (0C); salty water freezes at a much lower temperature.
Mechanical and chemical methods of ice removal are just more effective than thermal methods.
Yup. In both cases I mentioned it took about 3 seconds to realize it was a waste of time. Like many things, it worked much better in my mind prior to actually trying.
Or the guy who tried to warm up his gasoline on the stove to fix a frozen gas line in his car.
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