Repairs we get called to hereWhat actually gets called in around the valley
The repair list in Cincinnati is shaped by three things: winter, tree cover, and a lot of houses with more than one roof plane meeting at a valley.
Ice damming is not a roof fault, and repairing the roof will not stop it
A dam forms when heat escaping into the attic melts snow on the upper slope, the meltwater runs down to a cold eave and refreezes there. The ridge of ice then holds the next melt against the roof until it finds a way under the courses. The covering is doing what it was designed to do.
So the fix is intake and exhaust ventilation and the insulation line, not another layer of sealant at the gutter. We will say that even though it is the less convenient answer, because replacing shingles under a dam buys you one winter.
Shaded slopes wear differently
Clermont County and the river townships carry heavy tree cover, and a slope that stays damp under it holds moss and debris that a sunny slope sheds. Granule loss runs ahead of the rest of the roof there, and the valley below fills faster than anyone expects.
Half of what looks like a failing roof on those houses is a shaded plane and a blocked valley. Clearing and relining one valley is a different conversation from replacing a roof, and we will tell you which one you are in.
The leak that only appears in a thaw
A detail sealed rather than flashed will hold through a rainstorm and fail during a thaw, because meltwater arrives slowly, from above, and sits. That is why a leak somebody has already had looked at twice can still be genuinely hard to reproduce in summer.
When a leak is seasonal we look at the details that only see water under those conditions — the chimney cricket, the sidewall step flashing, the low end of a valley — rather than at the field of the roof.
When relining one valley is the right answer
A hillside house with cross-gables concentrates the runoff of several planes into a small number of valleys, and those valleys wear out well before the slopes either side of them do.
If the covering has life left, relining the valley in metal is a real repair rather than a stopgap. If the shingles either side are brittle, it is not, and we would rather have that conversation once.
