One of the most dangerous things about winter is snow, but not when the snow is falling. Snow that accumulates on the ground also accumulates on the roof and can become extremely dangerous as its mass grows and it starts to melt. When the snow is on the roof and melts, it transforms in to ice, and when that ice starts to slide off of the roof it becomes a dangerous and potentially deadly mass that moves at a dangerous speed. The only way for homeowners to protect themselves and their families is to use some kind of snow guard or snow rail to keep the ice and snow in place and to limit the amount of snow that hits the ground at once. Snow guards offer a variety of protections for homeowners.

Property Protection

Heavy snow and hard ice can cause serious damage to gutters and other roof components. A metal roof is especially vulnerable because of the low friction between the metal and the snow or ice as it begins to slide. Snow guards will keep the snow from gaining momentum that will crash in to the gutters and cause them to separate. The snow guards can also protect landscaping by retaining the snow until it begins to melt, reducing the mass of the snow that hits trees or hedges around the home. Without any kind of protection, gutters and landscaping stand little chance of escaping unscathed after a heavy snow storm.

Advanced Stability

Roofing guards offer a strategic solution for protection and they do more than simply blocking snow and ice from passing off the roof. Smart placement of the guards increases friction between the snow or ice accumulation and the roof. This counters the natural sliding motion of heavy melting ice and helps to hold the snow in place. Again, because of the low friction that metal roofs naturally offer, the increased friction offered by the snow guards is essential to keeping the snow in place.

Versatile Designs

Homeowners have often complained about installing snow guards because the guards looked ugly and detracted from the appearance of the home. Even though the guards offered property protection and reduced injuries from falling snow, it was more important for homeowners to keep their homes looking good, so they passed on the guards. Modern designs are made to match the color and style of the home, so you can choose to have both form and function in your design and you do not have to compromise the appearance of your house.

Over the last few years demand for snow guards has risen dramatically. Homeowners are seeing the value in protecting themselves from falling snow, and there has never been more companies offering snow guards services.

Recently Daniel Loggins, a happy customer had this to say, “I am Daniel Loggins and I have been a homeowner for ten years. Last year my wife and I installed guards from Sno Shield on our home, and while our neighbors were dealing with thousands of dollars in damages after a major blizzard, our repair costs were minimal.” Do yourself a favor, minimize your damage like the Loggins’ and install snow guards or a snow rail on your home.

The winter season is brutal, unpredictable, and often unforgiving to property. Even after a dangerous snowstorm leaves your area, the accumulated snow offers a potential danger, especially as it freezes and becomes solid ice. If you have a metal roof you are even more at risk because of the low natural friction between the metal and the snow. The best way to protect yourself from potential risk is to have some kind of snow guards or snow rail in place to slow or stop the sliding snow. There are three potential benefits you will find with snow guards.

Personal Injury

The most costly thing that can happen when snow falls is if it causes personal injury or death to people entering or exiting the home. As the homeowner you are liable if someone gets hurt, and this is not always covered by your home insurance policy, which can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars of liability directly on your shoulders. Snow guards will slow the amount of snow that hits the ground, and break up large chunks of ice that can do the most damage to people.

Repair Costs

Accumulated snow will also cause property damage if you are not careful to have some kind of protection. As the ice and snow slide from the roof the first place where they will cause damage is to the gutter system. In periods of light snowfall, the gutters can handle the snow on their own, but when you start talking about hundreds of pounds of ice and snow, the gutters fail and they will become misshapen and separated from the home. Once the snow hits the ground, any landscaping hit by the snow will be crushed and destroyed.

Home Value

The final place to consider the benefits of snow guards is the long term value of the home. If you have the guards in place before the home goes on the market, then you can use them as a selling point to potential buyers and you can make your home stand out even in a crowded market. The buyers will be happy not to have to do deal with the stress and hassle of installing the system themselves, and they will pay a premium price for snow guards already in place.

Protecting your home throughout the winter is easy, if you have the right tools in place. Snow guards will give you the peace of mind that you need even through the heaviest snow storms this winter.

Weather is extremely hard to predict and impossible to avoid, but inclement weather is the leading cause of home damage in many parts of the United States. In cold climates, snow is the most dangerous weather condition homeowners face. The accumulation of snow and ice on the roof can cause serious damage to the structure of the home, but it can also be a life threatening danger for anyone walking near the roof. The best way to limit your liability and protect your home investment is to install snow guards to limit the damage that snow can cause.

Why are snow guards necessary?

As snow collects on the top of the roof it grows in to a larger and heavier pile with each passing minute. Eventually gravity wins out and pulls the snow to the ground very suddenly, bringing hundreds of pounds of snow and ice to the ground all at once. The falling snow can damage landscaping, gutters and plumbing; however, the most frightening thing that can happen is for a person to get caught in the slide. Around walkways and entrances this sliding snow has been known to cause thousands of injuries a year in the United States, and even death in some instances.

How does a snow guard work?

Snow guards are a useful tool to make sure that when the snow and ice comes down it does not all come down in a giant sheet. The snow guards break up the snow and ice that accumulate and so the pieces that fall come in much smaller segments and they fall on a much more predictable basis. Because the snow guards act as retaining walls, the snow and ice are kept in place on the roof and much of their weight is nullified through the slow natural melting process.

What benefits will you see?

The most important and obvious benefit is safety, which is made even more important if you own a commercial or industrial building where you have a lot of liability exposure because of the number of people coming in and out of the building. At the very least, every home and business should have some kind of snow guard around their walkways and entrances? In addition, you will save money by protecting landscaping and gutter systems all along the roof.

As the Fall begins to become Winter, it is more important than ever to get ready for the cold weather. The installation of snow guards will help to save you a lot of money and potential lawsuits.

Warren Buffett is not only rich, but very smart (a significant reason why he is also the former!). He is competent but humble, and he does business, not because it makes him rich, but because he loves a challenge, he loves to work, and he loves to see himself progress in ways that don’t just have a dollar amount attached to it. Like his buddy Bill Gates, money is simply the by-product of passionately and tenaciously pursuing a worthy goal–it is little wonder then that they are so pro-active about their philanthropic efforts, because money is not their main objective!

People that are truly successful as a human being are givers before they get rich (if they even get rich at all), because they understand one key aspect of societal transactions that can be commonly missed by capitalistic greed, and that is something called VALUE.

As Mr. Buffett often says, “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” Sometimes we spend more than we need to, just to make a statement about our supposed (but false) wealth. While standardizing and assigning monetary value to goods and services is necessary for a capitalist growth economy, it should never be the sole decider, incentive, or aspect of something’s value. Indeed, if we as employees, employers, or business people only ever gave to our work what something is “worth” in dollars, then genuine and heartfelt acts of service and kindness–the things that really enrich life–would seldom occur, if at all.

You might work at minimum wage, or (especially in a period of a relative slow economy) not be getting paid what you feel you are “worth,” but that should never stop you from adding value and utility or happiness to your tasks and to your working environment.

With our snow guards and with our free consultation services, we really do aim to give you the best price possible, but more importantly, we try to give you the best value possible too. Our products speak for themselves–they look good, they are tough and durable, and they out-perform competitors in practice; but we aim also to provide you with a transaction experience that shows we care about your roof, your project, your property, and your peace of mind. Price is simply a number, but value–that’s a way of living!

Pictured above is Warren Buffett’s very nice, but still modest home. He purchased it in 1958 for just $31,500 (about $250,000 in today’s money), and insists that one’s wealth is determined by value and values rather than figures. Read more in this Huffington Post Article.

Normally the two words “drift” and “roof” to folks in our trade would create a picture of prevailing winds forcing a snow drift to bank its weight on one particular part of the roofing structure, creating a stress point for the building, and additional liability for any objects below that might get damaged by a pending ice or snow avalanche. However, to the rest of the world, “drift” and “roof” probably bring up an image of four smartly dressed African-Americans singing soothing tunes–that’s right, the classic “Up on the Roof” by the Drifters!

As the above image illustrates, knowing the wind patterns around your structure can be an important factor in determining how many snow guards you need to place, and where they need to be placed, as to give the best and most efficient protection for your property. Of course, evenly spreading them out everywhere will do the trick too, although this could be wasteful if certain parts of the roof do not require guards.

Anyway, as important as calculating all of this might be, remember to take a few minutes today to break away from the worries of the world, and find your “roof” so you can look at life from a different vantage point, and better appreciate it when you come back down. Take time to relax, Up on the Roof.

Yesterday marked the beginning of the Chinese Lunar New Year festival and celebrations for over a billion people worldwide. If you are turning 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72, 84, 96, 108 or 120, then this year of the snake should be a prosperous one for you! Just as a point of interest, it is not just the Chinese that celebrate the Lunar New Year but the Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Mongolians, and several other nations as well, in addition of course to the ex-pat communities of these cultures worldwide.

So, in the spirit of Asian-inspired new beginnings, we thought we’d show you an image of some rather grandiose looking roofs from the forbidden city in Beijing, China. One of our staff spent several months living, working, and studying in the region a couple of years back and found the roof design and architecture to be quite unique and appealing. However, although snowfall in most parts of China does not rival the conditions of America’s snow country, there is certainly still a clear need for snow guard and roof protection in the area, where ice commonly builds during the winter. Check out this crazy video below of a rather uniquely patterned fall of snow and ice avalanche in China:

If you’ve listened, read, or watched the news today, you may be aware that a massive snowstorm is headed for the East Coast of the U.S. over the next several days. Like all natural disasters and hazards, when the time for performance has come, the time for preparation has passed… make sure you are not caught off-guard at a time of vulnerability like this snow scare in the East. Snow guards or snow shields can give you peace of mind when tumultuous weather springs up like a thief in the night to take your property!

We’ve all heard of the “calm before the storm” and how we should all needfully prepare for rough times ahead. I remember in my teen years as I was learning to surf, about being told that every 7th wave would be the biggest; for newcomers in the water we would often notice their failure to understand the patterns of the tides and waves and see them get caught off-guard as a result, ending up in great danger and needing to get saved. Unfortunately most tests of strength (be it spiritually, intellectually, or structurally) are not so predictable, but history’s wisdom has taught us that periods of prosperity and/or calm are times for preparation–not complacency.

If you are in the East, be safe, plan well, and hopefully the storm will pass quickly. But for all of us, let’s try our best to not get caught off-guard.

Isn’t it funny how once you learn something new or are exposed to something fresh and different, that you start to notice that particular fact or thing or word in places that you never previously considered? Yesterday one of our friends who just recently learned about what we do at Sno Shield, e-mailed us this picture (below) of sliding ice and snow outside his window, with a caption along the lines of “saw this and thought of you.” We’ve had employees in the past too who had started to notice the same kinds of snow and ice dangers on roofs on just about every street they passed after starting working for us.

The need to be exposed to new ideas, ways, or facts of life is a great one for all of humanity, regardless of our natural or biased tendencies and preferences. Forcing ourselves to work outside of our comfort zone or to learn about something new and foreign expedites the life-learning process for us and leaves us better prepared for whatever the future has in store for us. As Pasteur’s famous tenet states, “chance favors the prepared mind,” and learning or seeking for new experiences very much sets the stage for that prepared state.

As the Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, wrote, we often see life like we are “looking through a glass darkly”–our perspectives are always skewed somewhat by the experiences we have had rather than the ones we haven’t. Thus, it can be easier for third parties to spot our ignorance even when we think we are being objective or unbiased. As such, breaking out of our socially constructed bubbles requires we try something new, that we associate with a new group of people, or at least hear them out and seek to understand where they are coming from. Be it our workplace, hobbies, communities, religion, or ideologies, all of our cultural paradigms have restrictions that prevent us from truly understanding the truth of the matter, whether it is the answer to the purpose of life, the answer to the best tax rate, or the answer to how many snow guards one should buy.

Life and its proclivities are far too complex to be answered by one mind, so take Plato’s advice and do what you can today to break out of your cave, and you might find that you find something new outside your window.