EasyHeat 80' Roof Deicing Cable, For Roof and Gutters, Pre-assembled for Ice and Snow Damage Prevention, 400 Watts

I've used various lengths of this Easy Heat de-icing cable for years; they are reliable and good value. As written in the manual, its primary purpose is NOT to melt 2" or thicker of snow or harden ice that caps the foot or two above the roof-line edge, eaves, gutters, or frozen solid downspouts. Its use is to PREVENT this buildup, which means IDEALLY turn on if an imminent (heavy) snow storm is brewing. Problem is that it draws quite a bit of electricity when running for days at a time, depending your region of the country, especially for longer cables and when multiple cables are installed around the house. If you have some alternative green, power generating means, then leave them on. For the rest of us relying on our local municipal power grid, you will definitely see an increased monthly electric bill. However, to prevent thousands of dollars of damage caused by ice dams outweighs this annual cost. There are trade-offs in the following suggestions (I did not like the Easy Heat Thermostat switch they sell, since when does below 32 degrees temperature indicate actual snow fall?). Here are two ways to minimize power consumption: 1. Assuming you or your electrician properly wired the de-icing cable for power, turn on all of the de-icing cables when the sun is shining fully, and turn them off at dusk. Though the temperature is below freezing, the sun's infrared radiation does aide to accelerate melting the snow and ice while the cables are turned on. (Another warning to sun bathers not to tan and to use sunscreen.) Even if it freezes again overnight, do so again the next day. Hopefully, it's another sunny day. The purpose is to relieve the build up of water in the gutters and down spouts. 2. Since it is impossibly inconvenient to time when the sun (dis)appears (drive home to turn them on or off), suddenly the weather turns for the worse, or if you travel a lot, what I've done is safely wired each de-icing cable to a remote power boot device that is typically used to remotely power off and on computers and servers over the Internet. There are many out there, and are costly (easily $350+, and you may need several of them depending on how many de-icing cables installed and its lengths). Find one where you can schedule multiple events during all 7 days in the week for automatic power off and on, instead of just a simple function of you triggering the receptacle ports to turn on and off (significantly cheaper). You need to be concerned with the power rating (in Amps) so it does not trip the electrical breakers or the unit itself. The assumption here is: you have reliable Internet access, you have knowledge of computer networking and as a electrician, and you are prepared to invest several hundred dollars if not much more. The pay off and savings will depend on how much it snows each season and your (scheduled) use of the cables. OR.. if you don't want to deal with any of this cost and maintenance, and your surrounding foundation's base is acceptable to take on a large body of rain water without flooding your basement (non-winter season), it is safe for ice build up (during the winter) on the ground, have long overhanging eaves, and the icicles formed won't kill anyone if fall, then completely remove all gutters and downspouts..like a ski lodge or cabin. Good luck!

I installed this in late fall 2015 and have only used it once so far. It worked well the one time, but we only got about 4-5 inches of snow. The major problem I had to solve was on the north side of the house where we had 3 or 4 ice dams over the 15 years we've lived here. They caused some water to leak into our kitchen window. My goal was to keep the gutters and downspouts working, so the melting water would have a place to get off of the roof. (I watched numerous youtube videos and read even more Amazon reviews and keeping the gutters and downspouts working seems to be the key to preventing ice dams.) I drilled a 1 inch hole near the bottom of the downspout and used a fish tape to get the wire up to the second story roof. I used a 1" diameter gray plastic electrical long elbow and attached it to the gutter with a threaded connector to the pipe. I friction fit the elbow into the fitting to allow removing the wire later should it need replaced. I then ran the non-plug end of the heat tape up the downspout and across the roof to the other gutter and downspout. I ran it up one downspout, through a short gutter, across the roof, through another gutter and partially down the other downspout. (I should have measured better! I needed another 17 or 18 feet to get to the bottom of the far downspout, so I should have got the 100 foot kit!) I'll probably be OK, since that's the sunny southern side of the house and we've never had an ice dam on that gutter or downspout. Most winters we don't have ice dams, so I decided to manually control the heat tape. I need to plug it into an exterior timer to minimize how long it runs each day. I forgot about it for 2 days the one time I used it!

Our house was built in 1949 by a crazy person. There are so many weird areas between the first and second floor that we actually had one entire portion of the roof rebuilt just to prevent leaking two years ago. Our builder told us the only way to completely solve our ice dam problems would be to remove the second floor of the house entirely and rebuild. Instead we had a new roof installed, we had almost the entire roof covered in Grace Watershield and as a trial we put Easy Heat down the gutters on the backside of the house where the ice was the very worst. The first part of our winter was mild with 50 degree temperatures and hardly any rain, but lately it has been brutally cold with -40 degrees and two feet of snow on average and we have not had any ice accumulate. Zero ice. Usually at this point in the winter we would have two feet of ice in the gutters. Our garage, where we did not install Easy Heat has mild ice build up from the recent snow (photo attached) and the back where we have Easy Heat has water running out the downspout (photo). Some tips from the extensive amount of research that I did before we installed this product. First, we had an electrician come out and install a special outlet for this project. It was only about $100 and it has made the whole thing so much easier. Second, we did not install the tape in the loops on the roof like the instructions say. I did weeks of reading and YouTube watching and finally decided that simply running the cable once down the bottom of the gutter then attaching it to the metal posts on the top of the gutter was sufficient - that is two rows down each gutter - back and forth. (Remember we used to have enormous ice dams that leaked into our house and destroyed the ceilings in five rooms.) We made sure to run the cable all the way down the downspout in a double thickness (with the special metal clips between) so the water would have a place to drain. (This also allows for easy roof raking, which my husband has done multiple times without worrying about hurting the wires because they are inside the gutters and not on top of the roof.) Third, we took the time to install it properly and use extra clips so that no wires would touch along the way (we used a crazy amount of clips). Fourth and most importantly, we turn the cable on BEFORE it starts snowing and we leave it on until it stops. Our neighbors have the same heat tape on their roof except they have the loop pattern, only. Right now they have ice hanging off their gutters with nice empty patches of snow melted off their roof where the cable has done its job, but because they don't have cable in the gutters the water doesn't have anywhere to go so it simply freezes again. Placing the cable inside the gutters and all the way down the downspout is the true solution to this horribly annoying problem. We purchased extra cable when it was on sale last year and in the fall we will be installing it on the garage so next winter we won't have the ice and snow build up on the front of the house.