I have never felt more validated about taking our ice dams seriously. This is part two of our “figuring it out as we go” first-time homeowner ice dam edition, and I’m sharing a real update on what’s actually working on our roof. Overall, the roof is looking really good, and we’ve been focusing on getting the upstream snow off so there’s less that can melt, feed the dam, and potentially cause water issues with the shingles (I truly don’t even want to put that out into the universe). We’ve been doing the “salt” approach—specifically a less corrosive salt (please look up the right kind for ice dams)—and while our salt sock attempts helped a bit, I still didn’t love how thick the dams looked from the bottom. So we tried the pantyhose trick people swear by: stuffing pantyhose with the salt to make longer “salt snakes,” plus the genius tip of tying strings on them so you can maneuver them where you need. I woke up skeptical… and then saw it: the pantyhose were carving an actual channel (a little tunnel!) through the ice. That’s the whole goal—give the water a way out so it’s not backing up under shingles—while we keep learning the hard way, like when one of our heating zones went out the same night.