Although icicles are pretty, you don't actually want them hanging down from your roof. When icicles form on your roof, they are known as ice dams. Ice dams can cause serious damage to your home. It is important to take steps to minimize the presence of ice dams on your roof.

Increase The Insulation in Your Attic

Ice dams are caused by heat escaping through your attic and melting the snow on your roof. When your attic is properly ventilated, you should not experience so many ice dams on your roof.

When you insulate your attic, start by putting more insulation on the floor of your attic. Putting insulation on the floor of your attic will help seal up air leaks from your ceiling into your attic. This will help keep the hot air that you heat your home with inside of your home instead of inside of your attic.

Next, if you have a bigger budget to increase the insulation, put insulation on the ceiling of your attic. This will prevent heat from leaving your attic and escaping through your roof.

Both of these steps should help reduce the heat lost from your home and should help prevent the build-up of ice dams on your roof.

Add Ventilation To Your Attic

Another reasons ice dams form is because the heat that gets into your attic doesn't have a proper way to escape. When you have the right ventilation in your attic, the heat is able to escape through particular vents. This funnels the heat to the appropriate locations and ensures that the heat that leaves your attic doesn't cause ice dams to form on the roof of your attic.

Clean Out Your Gutters

 You want to make sure that your downspouts are working properly, so when snow does melt off your roof, it has somewhere to go. Take some time to clean out all the leaves out of your gutter so that water can properly flow from your roof to your drainage system. If your gutter is clogged up, you are much more likely to experience ice dams near your gutters.

Install Heat Tape

Another solution is to install heat tape. You want to put the heat tape right along the edge of your roof and run it inside of your gutters and through the downspout. This will help ensure that any ice that reaches the edge of your roof melts instead of staying put.

Taking these four steps should reduce the occurrence of ice dams on your roof, which can be damaging for your roof. For more information, contact companies like Roof Right.