[BigV]

I've only watched a little bit of your video zip. Here's what's happening on your roof though. Snow falls on the whole roof. Since there's a slope, anything on the roof will move from the peak to the eave, snow and liquid water alike. Since the snow moves more slowly, it's not so much of a problem. However, your roof is not equally warm. This is KEY.

The area of your roof near the peak is warmer, but at the eaves, especially near the area of the roof that does not have house under it, the roof is much colder. What happens is when it gets just warm enough to melt over the greater area of the roof, but still cold outside, the snow melts, now liquid water drains down your roof toward your eave where it is much colder (no warm cozy house/attic heating it from beneath). Cold but liquid water hits cold roof, it freezes. Now you have ice at the eaves. This process continues to repeat until the ice dam gets too heavy to stay on the roof and it falls off, hopefully safely, but not always, or it just gets warm enough to melt everything. Either way, having that much water in that location on your roof is a bad idea.

the two products I saw in your links seemed to talk about mitigating this process, but were PRIMARILY concerned with preventing an avalanche of the snow from the peak to the eave by giving the snow some traction, either with one bar at the bottom or with several bars from eave to peak. The pics you show DO have some avalanche risk, but I see a bigger risk from the ice dam. You need to get that ice off of there before you have a big-GER problem, and maybe a *serious* injury.

Clearly no product you see on the internet or whereever will help you NOW, you have snow and ice on your roof NOW. This can't help you now. These products are to be installed on a clear roof, and work on subsequent winter accumulations. I'd work on getting that ice off. Hammers, picks, heat, something.

In Alaska, when I worked for an outfit that had hotels up there, ice dams on standing seam metal roofs were a real known hazard. I know that for major entryways, the roof was built in a different way so that traffic patterns didn't intersect with the low water point/ice dam location. You don't have that option, you walk right under that nearly horizontal gutter to get to your front door. Another option was to put strip heaters over areas where ice dams were a hazard, kind of like the pipe heaters you get in a strip and wind around a pipe, y'know. That COULD BE a potential help to keep an ice dam from forming in a very specific place, like in front of the walkways. I imagine you could even install this now, after beating that ice away, of course.

I'll keep thinking about this, but you really need to get that ice off of the gutters. That shit is heavy, you'll be LUCKY if the worst that happens is that it tears the gutters off your house.