Alayne took this photo of me raking snow off the roof yesterday afternoon. I'm joking when I call this a "New England custom" — I know this is done elsewhere — but until we moved to New Hampshire, we'd never seen anyone do it, let alone had to do it ourselves. But it seems like most of Lancaster was out this past week using these "roof rakes" to lighten the snow load on their roofs.
If you haven't had the pleasure of doing this yourself, the rake is 18' (5.4 m) long and amazingly light — though awkward. Given its length and the height you're reaching with it, you definitely get an upper body work-out. Of course, depending on the location of doors, you get a double work-out … first by raking it off the roof and onto the ground, then by shoveling it away from the door. (The rakes are also a lot safer than climbing up on a roof with a snow shovel!)
Back at the ranch in Montana, with colder, longer and snowier winters, we never had to worry about too much snow on our various buildings because we always used metal roofs. After a few hours of sunshine, snow just starts sliding off a metal roof — sometimes in small amounts, other times in big sheets that come down all at once with a sudden "whoosh!" In fact, we'd never build a new structure without using a metal roof — not only does snow slide off, but they last much longer than shingle or other roof types, are virtually maintenance-free, and offer better fire protection from flying embers.
But the house here has a shingle roof, and the one problem area is this section which joins the two wings. Even though it's south facing, it manages to trap and hold more snow than the rest of the house's roof surfaces. I'd raked it last weekend for the first time, then we had another snowfall during the week, and with a forecast for 6-10 inches of heavy wet snowfall for last night, that meant getting out the roof rake and hitting it all over again yesterday.
Fortunately we only got the lower end of that amount of snow overnight, but I was out there this morning, raking it off again. The roof on the house is in good shape, so it won't need replacing for quite a while. That's the good news. The bad news is I'll be raking snow for years to come. When the time does arrive to replace it, the new roof will be … metal!
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