Emergency Ice Dam Removal Near Cedar Rapids, Iowa
If you’re having an ice dam emergency in Linn or Johnson Counties, call the Ice Dam Guys® at 1-800-ICE-DAMS (800-423-3267) for same-day/next-day scheduling! Since 1995, we’ve removed thousands of ice dams and we’re the highest-rated ice dam removal company in America! We are properly licensed, bonded, and insured.
While the City of Five Seasons isn’t the snowiest destination the Ice Dam Guys® work each winter, it sure can be one of the coldest! Since you’re positioned in a humid continental climate (a fancy way of saying there’s a lot of precipitation here) your winters can be long, cold, and downright brutal. And what would a brutal winter be without ice dams?! Have you seen something like this fella below on your roof or in your neighborhood?
If so, that’s an ice dam and you don’t want them! Ice dams form when there’s a combination of factors working against you, most commonly when Iowa receives a ton of snow during really cold storms. However, if a random sunny afternoon appears that briefly heats the surface of your roof, it can cause a sort of “flash thawing”. This can also happen if there is unnatural heat loss into your attic from the home’s interior spaces. No matter why the roof has heated, it leads to snowmelt running down your roof without much resistance until it reaches the gutters, which are still frozen. Gutters and eaves take much longer to thaw than the majority of your roof because they aren’t insulated like the majority of your roof is. In fact, they can often have no insulation at all, so they stay frozen longer. If the majority of your roof takes an afternoon to thaw, the gutters could take a whole day. It’s because of this difference in thaw points and time that snowmelt begins accumulating behind the frozen gutters and adds layers upon layers of ice.
Unfortunately, most homeowners don’t see them forming, because they will often be buried under fresh snow that can make them hard to see. Thankfully, as you can see in the example photo above, homeowners can often learn they have an ice dam thanks to the large banks of icicles coming from the roof. Those, along with that slab or ribbon of ice atop the shingles, are telltale signs you have one. There’s also another sign of ice dams, but this one isn’t on the outside. Interior water leaks and ceiling collapses like the example from a customer’s home below can happen before you know it!
The reason ice dams so frequently produce water leaks is because of that snowmelt that has nowhere to go. Well, it does have somewhere to go, it’s just not off your roof thanks to frozen gutters. It’s a no-brainer that interior water leaks are not good and are expensive to fix, which is why we’re so passionate about teaching homeowners what to look for. If you suspect you have an ice dam, call us before it’s too late!
Effective and 100% Safe Steam-Only Ice Dam Removal in Johnson and Linn Counties
Prior to 1995 when the Ice Dam Guys® came on the scene, most homeowners had to call some out-of-work roofer to tackle their ice dams. Unfortunately, many times these contractors didn’t know what they were doing and they would regularly use abrasive or damaging methods for their removal attempts. Whether that was an ice pick, a steelhead shovel, hot water power washers, or huge bags of salt, the methods would regularly damage the customer’s home. All the blunt tools can damage shingles and your roof, while a heavy volume of water from a power washer would just add more water where you don’t want it! Lastly, ice melt products like salt can melt the ice, but they also produce a corrosive byproduct that can destroy your concrete and home’s siding. We never used methods like that or saw merit in them. We knew there had to be a better way, which is when we invented our own in-house steam beast, Steamzilla™!
Steam-only ice dam removal is the only option that is consistently safe yet effective. Unlike the other methods we’ve seen other trades perform on homes, our method hasn’t caused an issue yet! Seriously, not once! When our tech fires up ol’ Steamy they will create a grid-like pattern on your ice dam like they’re playing a solo game of Tic-Tac-Toe. Once the ice dam is separated into many small pieces of ice, they clear them from your roof until you’re left ice-free with free-flowing gutters. Here’s one of our techs doing this for a visual aid:
Our steam-only approach to ice dam removal has never let us down! Since we’ve been doing this nationwide since 1995, that’s a good track record!
Iowa’s Ice Dam Removal Experts
We’d love to say famous Cedar Rapidians like Ashton Kutcher and Elijah Wood have trusted the Ice Dam Guys® for all their ice dam removal needs, but they moved before we got here 🙁 That said, we have worked with and helped many of your real neighbors and we hope to help you too. We are licensed, bonded, and properly insured to perform ice dam removal on your home. You can find us hauling our machines through the following Cedar River communities:
Atkins, Bertram, Central City, Coralville, Cosgrove, Ely, Fairfax, Hiawatha, Iowa City, Marion, Midway, Mt. Vernon, North Liberty, Oasis, Oxford, Palo, Robins, Shellsburg, Solon, Springville, Sutliff, Swisher, Tiffin, Toddville, Walford, Western, and Whittier.
It can be hard to find worthwhile vendors on Google anymore, which is why we wanted to make it easy for you by telling you where to look:
- Angi.com: 100+ happy customers,
- BBB: an A+ rating for 10+ years,
- Google: we’re the top-rated ice dam removal company in the nation,
- Yelp: we have a perfect 5/5 stars from all customers.
At the end of the day, you’re having a problem that threatens the well-being of your home and we’re confident we’re the #1 choice for your home! We look forward to helping you today!
Call us now at 1-800-ICE-DAMS for same-day / next-day ice dam removal for your Cedar Rapids home.