Ice Dam Damage Repair

An ice dam is a ridge of ice at your cold roof edge that traps meltwater behind it and drives that water under the shingles and into the building, soaking the attic, insulation, ceilings, and walls long before you see a stain. Firstline Restoration stops the active leak, dries the structure to a verified standard, treats any mould, documents the loss, manages your insurance claim, and rebuilds what was damaged.

We have been doing this across the Greater Toronto Area for 20 years. Firstline is fully licensed and insured, WSIB covered, and 5-star rated on Google, open 24/7/365 with a 45-minute emergency response. We are not just a drying crew, we restore your home or building to pre-loss condition or better with one accountable team from first notice to the final coat of paint.

The danger of an ice dam is not the ice on the roof, it is the water it pushes into places you cannot inspect. That water saturates blown-in insulation, runs along ceiling joists, and wicks down into the wall cavity, where it stays warm, dark, and wet.

• Wet attic insulation collapses in R-value and stops protecting your home, which makes the next ice dam worse and quietly raises your heating bill.
• Trapped moisture in framing and sheathing feeds mould within 24 to 48 hours, per Health Canada and CMHC, and that mould can affect indoor air long before it is visible.
• Slow, repeated wetting rots the roof deck and ceiling structure, turning a winter leak into a structural repair if it is left to dry on its own.

You do not get to see most of this happening. That is exactly why it needs to be measured and dried by someone who does this every day, call Firstline before a stain becomes a gutted ceiling.

Ice dams are a heat-loss problem disguised as a roof problem. Warm air leaking from the living space into the attic melts the snow on the upper roof, that meltwater flows down to the eaves where there is no heat below, and it refreezes into a growing ridge of ice. Each freeze-thaw cycle in a typical Toronto-area winter adds more trapped water with nowhere to drain.

Older homes and homes with thin or uneven attic insulation, poor attic ventilation, or recessed lights and bypasses leaking heat upward are the most vulnerable. That is why the same houses flood at the roofline winter after winter. We restore the damage now, and we document the cause so you and your insurer understand why it happened, and so the repair is done in a way that does not simply set up the next one.

The instinct is to get up there and knock the ice off, or to pay the cheapest handyman to do it. Chipping at an ice dam with a hammer, axe, or roof rake cracks shingles, tears flashing, and gouges the roof, creating fresh leak points exactly where the water already is. Climbing an icy winter roof is also how serious falls happen.

And even if you clear the ice, you have done nothing about the water already inside the building. The cheap option treats the symptom on the roof and ignores the soaked insulation, the wet ceiling cavity, and the mould starting in the attic. A few weeks later it surfaces as a sagging ceiling and a much larger bill. We remove the ice safely with steam and, more importantly, deal with the damage it already caused.