The short version
I came up through roofing, gutters and exterior restoration, and spent a lot of years on the insurance side of that work — documenting damage, writing scopes, meeting adjusters and arguing supplements. Ice Dam Now came out of noticing the same two failures every winter.
The first was method: homeowners paying people to damage their roofs faster than the ice would have. The second was documentation: real damage going unpaid because nobody photographed anything while it was happening.
Why the method rule is absolute
I have stood on roofs in March looking at granule loss in a pattern that exactly matches where somebody ran a pressure washer in January. The ice was gone. So was ten years of the roof's life, and the warranty with it.
So the rule here does not bend: steam, or we do not take the job. If a crew cannot reach something with a lance, we find another way to reach it. We do not pick up a hammer.
Why we document everything
From the restoration side I know what an adjuster needs to approve a claim and what gives them room to deny one. The difference is almost always contemporaneous evidence — dated photographs of the dam, the entry points and the interior, taken while the event is live.
That costs us twenty minutes per job. It routinely decides whether a homeowner is covered. It is the easiest trade in this business.
What I will not claim
I am a contractor, not a public adjuster and not an attorney. I cannot promise your carrier will pay, I will not offer to cover your deductible, and I will not handle a claim on your behalf. People who offer those things are describing something other than a mitigation service.
What I can do is make sure that when your claim is assessed, the evidence is already there and the scope is written in the language the carrier estimates in.