Skylights & rooflights in Heathfield

Three ways up

A house with a side passage or a rear garden can usually take a scaffold behind the building, out of sight of the road. A house on a road with parked cars in front may do better with a tower from the street. A low single-storey roof over an extension is sometimes reached from a mobile platform, with no scaffold at all. We choose between them at the free survey, never on the day.

If a scaffold or a parked platform will stand on the public highway, the highway authority needs to licence it. For Heathfield that is East Sussex County Council, and we make the application ourselves. Each stage is explained in our scaffold licence and bay suspension guide. The route, the licence and the price are then written onto one page of your quote, which we call the access plan.

We hold no surveyed list of house types for Heathfield and will not pretend to one. So rather than describe the town street by street, we describe the jobs that tend to arrive from a town of this kind: a house of some age that has been extended, a bungalow with an unused loft, and a single-storey rear room built long after the house around it.

The older house with a later extension

The house itself has a pitched roof, perhaps tile, perhaps slate. The extension behind it has a flat or low-pitched roof, built at a different time by different people. That is two roofs with two sets of problems, and often two different rooflights. For the main house, the fit is a roof window let into the slope. The extension takes a flat roof rooflight or a lantern on a kerb. Treating them as one job is how people end up with the wrong product on the wrong roof.

The bungalow with the boarded loft

A bungalow gives you a roof with room to spare and rooms below it that may be short of light. A roof window can turn the loft into a usable space, or bring daylight onto a hallway beneath. The ceiling height and the rafter size decide how large an opening is sensible. We measure these at the survey and do not guess them from outside.

The windowless middle of the plan

Bathrooms, landings and utility rooms tend to sit in the middle of a house, away from any outside wall. Where there is a roof directly above, a rooflight serves them. Where there is a loft void in between, a sun tunnel carries light down a short tube and needs only a small opening in the roof.

Thinking about the room first

Before anyone chooses glass, it is worth standing in the room and asking what it lacks. A kitchen that is bright at the window end and dim at the back wants light over the worktop, not over the table. A landing wants light at the top of the stairs. A loft room wants it overhead and a little to the side, so the bed is not under a hot patch at noon. Answers like these decide the position of the opening, and the position decides which rafters have to be trimmed.

Whatever the house, we read the roof before we quote. We note the covering, the pitch, the rafter spacing and the state of the felt or membrane underneath, because the flashing and the fixings depend on all four. A price that ignores them is a guess, and our quotes are fixed and written.

• A pitched roof over a bedroom or loft room: a roof window, including VELUX sizes where the existing opening suits them.
• A flat extension roof over a kitchen or family room: a flat roof rooflight.
• A wide room that can carry a raised glazed roof: a roof lantern.
• A room that gets stuffy: an electric or opening rooflight, so the glass can vent the room as well as light it.
• A flat roof you need to step onto, for cleaning or to reach a plant: a walk-on rooflight.

Flat rooflight or lantern over an extension

This is a common choice for rear extensions. Both bring daylight down from above, but they behave differently in the room.

The glass itself is a separate decision. Heat loss and solar gain depend on the specification, so read the page on energy efficient rooflights and ask for the figures on whichever unit you are considering.

Heathfield is in the planning area of Wealden District Council, in East Sussex. Whether a new rooflight on your house needs an application depends on the building and on any condition attached to it. The national rules are set out in our planning guide for rooflights, so we will not repeat them here.

What we have not confirmed

We have not confirmed whether any part of Heathfield lies in a conservation area, so we name none. The published information on Article 4 directions for the district also disagrees with itself: one set of council pages suggests there are none available, while the register lists some for particular sites. We would sooner tell you that than guess. A short call or email to Wealden District Council about your own address settles it, and costs nothing.

Flats, conversions and shared roofs

If you live in a flat or a converted building, the roof is probably not yours alone to alter. The freeholder's written consent usually comes first. Our flats and leasehold rooflight guide sets out what to ask the freeholder and which clauses of your lease to read.

The Building Control side

Planning and Building Control are separate doors. In this part of East Sussex the Building Control service is the East Sussex Building Control Partnership, led by Wealden and shared with Eastbourne, Hastings and Rother. Where your work calls for notification, we handle it. The Building Regulations guide explains what the rules ask of the unit.

Misting between the panes

A double-glazed unit is two sheets of glass with a sealed gap. When the edge seal lets go, damp air gets in and leaves a film that no cloth reaches. The unit no longer insulates as it should. There is no way to reopen and dry the gap, so a fresh unit is the answer, and signs to check for from indoors are listed on the misted and failed rooflights page.

Plastic that has gone brittle

Acrylic and polycarbonate domes yellow and craze in sunlight. A dome in that state lets in less light every year and can split along its fixing line. These are often swapped for a proper glass rooflight, and the existing kerb can often stay.

Frames that have moved

Timber swells and shrinks. A frame that has twisted leaves a gap in the flashing, and water finds it long before a stain shows on a ceiling. We look at the frame, the flashing and the timber around the opening, because a new unit set into rotten timber only moves the trouble along.

It is easy to assume that a replacement is a simple swap. Sometimes it is. But the old unit hides the condition of the kerb, the timber and the felt beneath it, and we only learn that once it is out. So the quote says plainly what is being kept and what may need changing, and anything beyond that is agreed with you before we carry on. Once we have decided what the new unit is, the work follows a fixed order.

1. Survey. We visit, look at the roof from outside and from the loft, and measure the opening and the kerb.
2. Written quote. The price is fixed and sits beside the access plan, so nothing is settled on the day.
3. Access in place. The scaffold, tower or platform goes up, with any licence already sorted.
4. Old unit out, new unit in. We strip the old unit, check what is under it, then fit and flash the new one.
5. Weathered before we leave. The opening is weathered before we leave, so the roof is never left exposed overnight.

Behind the installation stands a 10-year workmanship guarantee. What moves a price is explained on the costs page, and a survey can be booked through the quote form.