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NNE Cold Season Thread 2020-2021


wxeyeNH
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22 minutes ago, J.Spin said:

That’s interesting - is that gutter/climate stuff really true?  I have to assume we’re in a pretty cold/snowy climate up here in the mountains of NVT, and lots of people have gutters.  I think I’ve had gutters on just about every house I’ve lived in up here in NVT.

My dad is a carpenter/contractor, and one thing I’ve known since I was a kid is that if you have icicles of any sort on your house, it’s bad news.  It means you’re losing heat and the issue should be addressed.  I remember complaining as a kid to my dad about how we never had any icicles on our houses, and I thought it was a bummer because they looked cool.  He’d chastise me of course, telling me the reality of the situation.

I will say, we’ve been in our current house for ~14 years, and through all these crazy winters, I’ve never seen an icicle on the house.  So obviously places can be built in a way to address the issue.  Maybe the gutters catch any liquid that comes off the roof?  The thing is, the snow on our roof never seems to melt anyway, it just sits there all winter and slowly disappears in the spring.  One winter, when the snow on the roof was really stacking up, I asked our builder if we should ever consider clearing snow from the roof.  He laughed and said “Nope, your place is built to code for your location; you’ll never have to worry about that.”  So, I never touch the snow on the roof.

Our builders for this house definitely know their stuff, and they built with gutters and we’ve had no issues of any sort.  I do of course clean out the gutters each fall to get rid of the leaves, but other than that, there hasn’t been anything else to address.

If you have excellent insulation under your roof then you can definitely have gutters up there. Sounds like your house is well insulated if you rarely get any snow melt on the roof. But an old house like mine that we haven’t re-insulated yet, it would never survive a winter up north with gutters....those gutters would be trashed after a winter or two. 

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2 minutes ago, ORH_wxman said:

If you have excellent insulation under your roof then you can definitely have gutters up there. Sounds like your house is well insulated if you rarely get any snow melt on the roof. But an old house like mine that we haven’t re-insulated yet, it would never survive a winter up north with gutters....those gutters would be trashed after a winter or two. 

If J. Spin’s old man was as diligent about roofing and insulation as his son is about measuring snow, I’m guessing that house is tighter than a vacuum chamber. LOL

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I don't see any gutters on the houses around where I live, but I would not see any issue with them if you were well insulated like jspin is and didn't have any kind of ice dam issues. I think the problem would be an ice build up eventually pulling them down. I have a garden shed out back and there is an icicle extending from the roof (maybe 8 feet tall) all the way into the snow lol.

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2 minutes ago, Patriot21 said:

I don't see any gutters on the houses around where I live, but I would not see any issue with them if you were well insulated like jspin is and didn't have any kind of ice dam issues. I think the problem would be an ice build up eventually pulling them down. I have a garden shed out back and there is an icicle extending from the roof (maybe 8 feet tall) all the way into the snow lol.

I have gutters and pretty decent insulation but that wet heavy snow we had in January really had some moisture that seeped out on the non cold days that has built some icicles. Usually I don’t have a lot and none have formed in the last several weeks.  I’m raking the roof tomorrow. 

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5 minutes ago, Patriot21 said:

I don't see any gutters on the houses around where I live, but I would not see any issue with them if you were well insulated like jspin is and didn't have any kind of ice dam issues. I think the problem would be an ice build up eventually pulling them down. I have a garden shed out back and there is an icicle extending from the roof (maybe 8 feet tall) all the way into the snow lol.

Seems kinda hard to believe a house in NNE that receives 150” of snow a year wouldn’t have ANY icicles. 

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1 hour ago, PhineasC said:

Weird. Seems like gutter technology and design is very different over the border here in NNH. LOL

I am no gutter expert, but the log home guys I have had out to the house all indicated I was within normal parameters without gutters for the kind of house I have. Perhaps the situation is different for a stick-built house. 

I see a mix of gutters and no gutters around here.  Your ice dams look pretty impressive on that place in the corners, ha.  Those are some decent icicles.

I love the look of death icicles though, stuff that when they fall your definitely dying if underneath lol.  Very wintry looking.

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2 hours ago, ORH_wxman said:

If you have excellent insulation under your roof then you can definitely have gutters up there. Sounds like your house is well insulated if you rarely get any snow melt on the roof. But an old house like mine that we haven’t re-insulated yet, it would never survive a winter up north with gutters....those gutters would be trashed after a winter or two. 

 

41 minutes ago, PhineasC said:

Seems kinda hard to believe a house in NNE that receives 150” of snow a year wouldn’t have ANY icicles. 

I’m pretty sure the main component is as Will suggested – really good insulation.  I remember our builder and the home inspector both mentioning that.  It looks like everything in zones 5 through 8 currently calls for R49 to R60 in the attic, so I’m sure they hit that mark at least.

Part of why we don’t have any icicles may be due to the fact that we do have gutters, so they’d catch any liquid that would fall off the roof.  But if you look at the snow on the roof, you can see that it’s an even stack, similar to what’s out there on elevated surfaces at ambient temperature.  That suggests that melting from the roof is pretty minimal.  Obviously when it rains, we’re going to have water percolate through that snowpack and get to the gutters, but if temperatures are above freezing, that water will simply flow through the normal system and drain out.

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2 hours ago, PhineasC said:

If J. Spin’s old man was as diligent about roofing and insulation as his son is about measuring snow, I’m guessing that house is tighter than a vacuum chamber. LOL

My dad actually spent much of his career as a finish carpenter, and yeah, he’s known for being very meticulous.

While he has helped us out with plenty of stuff on our house (deck, interior stuff, etc.), he didn’t actually build it.  We bought it as a new build from a local builder (Godbout Development).  But as you can imagine, when we were house shopping, we had my dad visit the top candidates to get his thoughts as an expert.  When he signed off on this one, we knew it was a quality build.

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1 hour ago, powderfreak said:

I love the look of death icicles though, stuff that when they fall your definitely dying if underneath lol.  Very wintry looking.

I love the wintry look of icicles as well, although I have to say that I’m glad that we don’t have to deal with them here.  We know not to outwardly enjoy them when driving around the countryside with my dad though – he’ll just cringe and shake his head in disgust.

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10 minutes ago, J.Spin said:

I love the wintry look of icicles as well, although I have to say that I’m glad that we don’t have to deal with them here.  We know not to outwardly enjoy them when driving around the countryside with my dad though – he’ll just cringe and shake his head in disgust.

Tell your dad to stay away from Randolph Hill Road in that case. Icicle HQ over here. LOL

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11 minutes ago, J.Spin said:

I love the wintry look of icicles as well, although I have to say that I’m glad that we don’t have to deal with them here.  We know not to outwardly enjoy them when driving around the countryside with my dad though – he’ll just cringe and shake his head in disgust.

Definitely a sign of heat escaping and melting on the eaves.  But oh so wintry.

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2 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

Definitely a sign of heat escaping and melting on the eaves.  But oh so wintry.

I plan to have the house stripped and all flashing removed and replaced this summer, so that will probably help somewhat. The roof will also need to be replaced within a few years and that will be the time to see what's going on above the logs in the ceiling. There may be no insulation up there for all I know. This house was built by a local and his buddies, and I know corners were cut and deals were made. I have already seen how they cut corners on the septic drain field and dumped a bunch of clay in there. Being a log home, it will probably never be as tight as a modern wrapped stick-built house. It has seen these icicles for 20 years now with no damage to the roof or wall structures so I haven't been super concerned about it. The deck is another story. The ice build up on the deck is trashing it.

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13 hours ago, J.Spin said:

No, definitely no gutter heaters; I’ve never even heard of them, and I’m sure my dad would have talked about them if he built them into any of our houses.  Our builder here never said anything about them, and I’ve been up there enough times to have a good familiarity with the setup of our gutters at this point.

 

I have serious gutter issues on the front entrance to my house.  There is a long flat overhang which is great a covered entrance.  Keep my firewood there.  But it’s a flat roof with no heat.  when we get big snow, it just sits, freezes the gutter up resulting in icicles and ice on the walkway entering the house.  Have an 80’ gutter heater cable which I plug into a thermostatic outlet plug so it runs when the temp is below 35f.  Keeps the gutter clear, mostly.  It’s a lifesaver.

see photo below.  Heat loss is not the issue.  The gutter is a good six feet from the house.

ED84F145-7B7F-4733-ABC3-99910CB3568D.jpeg

9C7A446D-7657-4AF6-B4C9-4D664D294A62.jpeg

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11 hours ago, PhineasC said:

Some deep, deep winter pics from the compound today. @Fozz, this blows 2009-2010 away. No competition. Best winter of all time for me.

Unknown-3.jpeg.8db3c8c34bc16000e9d0d396da93dcf3.jpegUnknown-2.jpeg.5f40303cb9065acf9450f36c455ea513.jpegUnknown-1.jpeg.994025b425fd23e08f2f85a1d579f970.jpeg

That’s an incredible sight. The giant icicles remind me of Feb 2010, and I remember thinking that the Baltimore suburbs looked like ski towns. But this seems to easily top that month, and it looks like close to 4 ft on the ground.

6 hours ago, J.Spin said:

I was just finishing up a ski tour this afternoon when I got a text alert that we’d been put under a Winter Storm Watch.  Obviously the BTV NWS is concerned enough by what they’re seeing in the modeling to put up a preliminary alert.  We’re not to the point yet that our point forecast lays out all the potential accumulation, but they do have a headline out that suggests 6 to 9 inches of snow are possible from Monday into Tuesday.  The latest BTV NWS alert and projected accumulations maps are below:

 

13FEB21A.jpg

13FEB21B.jpg

I just arrived in Vermont, and I plan to stay around for the next 4-6 weeks. Because I work remotely and deep winter in SNE isn’t enough for me :lol:. Tuesday is looking very good here.

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10 hours ago, PhineasC said:

Seems kinda hard to believe a house in NNE that receives 150” of snow a year wouldn’t have ANY icicles. 

I think it's great to have all that insulation, some people just really understand insulation and air sealing. I'm in the icicle club myself, house built in 1820 and does need some help in the attic area with in insulation.

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12 hours ago, PhineasC said:

Seems kinda hard to believe a house in NNE that receives 150” of snow a year wouldn’t have ANY icicles. 

Especially in March with warmer days followed by nights well below freezing.  Insulation-independent icicles.

We have about 10 feet of gutter, open-ended so no downspouts, above the steps from porch to driveway and get serious icicles at each end.

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7 hours ago, Fozz said:

That’s an incredible sight. The giant icicles remind me of Feb 2010, and I remember thinking that the Baltimore suburbs looked like ski towns. But this seems to easily top that month, and it looks like close to 4 ft on the ground.

I just arrived in Vermont, and I plan to stay around for the next 4-6 weeks. Because I work remotely and deep winter in SNE isn’t enough for me :lol:. Tuesday is looking very good here.

Where are you staying?

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Phin,  when did they do the logging on opposite you?   It looks like corn rows.  I'm sure in the summer it blends in but I bet all the people on Randolph Hill were not happy when their wilderness views got a chunk taken out.

You have a great full sun southern view for solar but with all the snow I don't know how well that would work out.

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1 hour ago, wxeyeNH said:

Phin,  when did they do the logging on opposite you?   It looks like corn rows.  I'm sure in the summer it blends in but I bet all the people on Randolph Hill were not happy when their wilderness views got a chunk taken out.

You have a great full sun southern view for solar but with all the snow I don't know how well that would work out.

Not sure. It has been like that since I moved here. It is kinda jarring this time of year. But I guess they needed to log out that rectangle for some reason... 

We get great solar heating on sunny days. It can be 10 degrees out and the great room is like 80 and we want to crack a window. LOL

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