How to Winterize Your Roof: A Utah Homeowner's Checklist

Winter along the Wasatch Front asks more of a roof than most seasons do. It isn't only the snow. It's the cycle - snow melts during the day, water runs into gaps, then refreezes overnight and expands. A crack that was harmless in September becomes a gap by February.

The good news is that most of what goes wrong in winter is visible before winter starts. Here's what to look at.

Start with the gutters

Clogged gutters are the most common winter roof problem, and the easiest one to prevent. When gutters are full of leaves and grit, meltwater has nowhere to go. It backs up under the bottom row of shingles and sits there.

Clear them out, and while you're up there, check that the downspouts actually run clear and that the gutters are still firmly attached. A gutter that has started to pull away from the fascia will not survive a winter's worth of ice.

If the gutters are sagging, rusted through, or pulling loose at the brackets, replacing them before winter is far less painful than dealing with it in January.

Look for shingles that have lifted, cracked or gone missing

From the ground, with binoculars if you have them, look across each slope for anything that breaks the pattern - a shingle sitting proud of the others, a corner curled up, a gap where one has gone entirely.

Lifted and cracked shingles matter more in winter than in summer. In warm weather water runs off a compromised shingle and keeps going. In winter it gets underneath, freezes, and lifts the shingle further. Each freeze makes the gap a little bigger.

Check the flashing

Flashing is the metal that seals the joins - around the chimney, around vents and skylights, and in the valleys where two slopes meet. These are the places roofs leak first, because they're the places where the roof isn't a simple flat plane.

Look for metal that has lifted, rusted, or separated from the surface it's sealed against. Valleys carry more water than anywhere else on the roof, so anything loose there is worth attention.

Look at the soffit and fascia

The soffit is the underside of the eave; the fascia is the board the gutters attach to. They're easy to ignore because they aren't really the roof, but they're the first place water damage shows.

Look for staining, soft or crumbling wood, peeling paint, or sections that have pulled away. Soffit also carries the vents that let the attic breathe - which matters for the next point.

Check insulation and ventilation in the attic

This is the one most homeowners skip, and it's the one that causes ice dams.

An ice dam forms when heat escaping from the house melts snow on the upper part of the roof. That meltwater runs down to the eaves, which are colder because there's no heated space beneath them, and refreezes there. A ridge of ice builds up, and the water behind it has nowhere to go but sideways and under the shingles.

The fix isn't on the roof - it's in the attic. Adequate insulation keeps household heat where it belongs, and proper ventilation keeps the roof deck closer to the outside temperature so snow doesn't melt unevenly. If your attic feels warm in winter, that's worth looking into.

Trim anything overhanging

Branches that touch or hang over the roof will scrape shingles under wind load, drop debris into the gutters all winter, and shed snow in heavy loads onto one spot. Cutting them back is cheap and takes an afternoon.

What to do about what you find

Some of this is homeowner work. Clearing gutters and trimming branches are reasonable weekend jobs if you're comfortable on a ladder.

The rest usually isn't - partly because diagnosing roof problems from the ground has limits, and partly because the thing you can see is often not the whole story. A lifted shingle might be one shingle, or it might be the visible edge of a section where the underlayment has failed.

If you've found something and you're not sure how serious it is, that's exactly what a roof inspection is for.