Recent research from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has pointed out new priorities for solving ice dam problems. Common practice for years has been to address ice dams with more ventilation. It was when this practice wasn?t working very well that the researchers took a closer look a...
I think it would be fair to define a "skylight" as a window in the roof that you can see the sky and clouds through. Some of them now use frosted glazings, so you can't quite see through them, but they are still basically designed like a window with a deep skylight well below them.A "light w...
Nancy in Manitoba has bad ice dams on her roof. She sent me a great sketch of her whole attic arrangement, complete with knee walls and cathedral ceilings, not to mention a dormer -- and there is no ventilation in the roof in front of the dormer.The guidelines for eliminating ice dams are sim...
The construction industry uses a lot of power nailers today. Most of these are pneumatic simply because driving a nail in with a single blow requires a tremendous amount of power. A hammer delivers much less power, which means hitting the nail many times to get the same job done. But power...
One viewer has recommended using Urea fertilizer to melt ice on the roof rather than using salt-based de-icers.Actually, the research done, during the famous 1998 Eastern ice storm, confirms this idea. The salt will discolour the shingles and rust the gutters and generally not be good for eith...
James has water that spills out of one corner of his rain gutters where there is no downspout. And the downspout that goes into the weeping tiles often overflows.It could be that the slope of the rain gutters is not steep enough to drain away the water, or that the size of the rain gutter is t...
Annie has three roofs on her house, a shingled roof in the front part followed by an asphalt and gravel flat roof and then an elastomeric membrane flat roof over her back porch. They all seem to leak. The asphalt roof is only six years old, installed by someone who advertised in the local paper...
For years we have had factory built homes where the entire home was built in a factory and then trucked to a site and put on a foundation, much like a mobile home. When people wanted larger factory built homes, they started making them in two halves, to fit on the trucks, and stuck them toge...
Joe is one of those nice guys from New England who doesn't like wasting things. Joe spent most of his life as a roofer and in the asphalt shingle business, using and disposing of roofing brackets is just part of the business. Roof brackets are the supports that are temporally nailed to the ...
20 years ago Bob built a geodesic dome in Saskatchewan. As you can see, it was a community effort. After all this time he has finally gotten tired of the snow melting off the roof creating all kinds of ice cycles, so he is asking about the feasibility of putting some Styrofoam right over th...
