Heat tape for roofs11/27/2022 Running 24/7, it adds up to a sizable monthly bill. But at 7 Watts per foot, a 40′ eave could use 560 Watts to electrically heat the outdoors. Heat strips are common here in upstate NY. Glad to see you write about the bane of Northern auditors, Allison. Guest Post: What Causes Ice Dams and Icicles? They even heat most of the sidewalks in that town. But hey, they’re 100% efficient! And if you have a house in Aspen, paying for electricity is certainly not a concern. #Heat tape for roofs install#Because so few people seem to understand basic building science, they install heat strips instead. The real solution is to fix the heat loss problem with air sealing and insulation. The water then drains down the roof and refreezes at the eaves. The short answer is that, much of the time, the snow melts above the the conditioned space because of excessive heat loss from the house. (Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!)īut why are they up there anyway? The aforementioned Nate Adams wrote a guest post on icicles and ice dams for us back in January, so I’ll let you go back and read that for a fuller explanation. In the photo below, it’s not really so clear to someone who’s not familiar with roof heat strips. Who knew?! The photo above shows pretty clearly that something unnatural is going on. Turns out, that interesting pattern is because of the heat strips installed on the edge of the roof to melt snow and ice dams. I just thought that was an interesting snow melt pattern. In fact, when I posted the lower photo in this article to Facebook, my friend Nate Adams of Energy Smart Insulation wrote, “ Heat cables? Are you going to make me come down there?” Not being from snow country, I didn’t know what they were. On my trip to Aspen, Colorado last week, when I learned to ski, I noticed an interesting snow pattern on a lot of the roofs of the houses near where we stayed.
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