Do you have to rake the roof? The storms so far this year have been relatively minor and temps are warm enough so that you have to decide on whether or not you need to do it. I do it regularly on a second-story roof. I bought two roof rakes that have three sections each so that I can use four sections to reach the roof. This allows me to do about 3 feet off the bottom of the roof. There are windows above the roof and I can shovel the snow off the upper roof. This is all a fair amount of work as you can imagine though my son will help out with the shoveling if I ask; and sometimes he volunteers. We just got a new roof so I don't know if we need to do this but I'm just used to doing it.

Most of my neighbors don't clear their roofs and I assume that they don't have problems, I do it because of past problems with ice dams. Are you doing this because you have had leaks or ice dams in the past? If so, it's generally a judgement call - will it melt on its own without having to rake it - and I make this calculation every storm. If it's 1-3 inches and we have 1-2 days of above-freezing temperatures, then I may not bother.

The only other approaches that I've heard of are to get a metal roof or a metal roof bottom with heating elements to melt ice dams.

We only have to do one roof because the roof is not steeply angled which means that snow and ice don't fall off quickly. The other roofs are at a steeper angle and don't have leak issues.