Service
Winter Property Care
Calgary winter is the season that turns a small problem into a claim.
Winter is when vacant-property risk in Alberta is at its highest, and it is concentrated in two failures: heat stops, or water gets somewhere it should not. Everything in the winter checklist exists to shorten the time between one of those starting and someone knowing about it.
Visits record interior temperature in multiple locations, whether the furnace is running, thermostat state, and conditions at known cold spots — garages, basements, bathrooms on exterior walls, rooms above unheated space. Frost patterns on windows and unusual condensation get photographed, because they are often the first visible sign that something has changed.
Outside, the work is snow and ice. Walks and access cleared through a coordinated provider, ice hazards noted, snow load on low-slope sections observed, downspout discharge checked so meltwater is not running back toward the foundation, and ice damming photographed from the ground when it appears after a chinook.
Where heat has failed, the response is documentation, contact, and a licensed HVAC technician. Nobody here touches a furnace.
Common questions
Do chinooks cause problems for vacant properties?
Yes, and they are underrated as a risk precisely because they feel like relief.
A chinook can raise temperatures 20 to 30 °C within a day, then drop them back overnight. That cycling is harder on a building than steady cold. Snow melts and refreezes, building ice dams at roof edges. Meltwater runs toward foundations and refreezes in downspouts and window wells. Materials expand and contract repeatedly.
Chinooks also bring strong wind — sustained speeds regularly exceeding 100 km/h in west and southwest Calgary and in the foothills. That produces roofing damage, displaced outdoor items, and wind-driven water intrusion at windows and wall junctions.
The practical response is to check the property after chinook events rather than only on a fixed schedule: look at roof edges for ice dam formation, confirm downspout discharge is clear and running away from the foundation, check ceilings near exterior walls for the first signs of intrusion, and confirm nothing has been displaced by the wind.
Do I still have to clear snow if nobody lives there?
Yes. City of Calgary bylaw requires the public sidewalk adjoining a property to be cleared of snow and ice within 24 hours of a snowfall ending. That obligation attaches to the property owner and does not pause because the property is empty or the owner is out of the country.
Failure to clear can result in the city arranging removal and billing the owner, plus a penalty. More practically, an uncleared walk in front of an obviously empty house is a liability if someone is injured, and it is one of the clearest possible signals that nobody has been there.
Arranging clearing is straightforward; the part that fails is verification. Owners commonly book a service from another province, receive invoices, and never confirm the work was actually done. Having someone confirm and photograph the result after each snowfall closes that loop.
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