About Heritage Skylights Oxford

Rooflights, and nothing else

The range is narrow on purpose. Roof windows in pitched roofs, fixed and opening rooflights, roof lanterns over extensions, and flat-roof glazing on rear additions, garages and commercial decks. We install VELUX, Fakro, Keylite and Roto units, and specify across all four rather than defaulting to whichever we happen to have in the van.

Much of the work is residential: a loft being lit or converted, a landing with no window, a rear kitchen extension that never sees the afternoon. Commercial and institutional work runs alongside it, on converted period stock, practices and offices around the county. The technical questions are the same at both scales; the access arrangements, the programme and the paperwork are what change.

We have been installing rooflights for fifteen years, which is long enough to have met most of the ways a roof can surprise you, and to have formed firm opinions about detailing that we are happy to explain rather than assert.

Specialists rather than generalists

A rooflight is a hole cut into the one part of a building whose entire job is to keep water out. Whether it stays dry afterwards has little to do with the glass. It is decided by the height of the upstand above the finished covering, the fall of the surrounding roof, the direction and depth of the flashing laps, and where the covering terminates against the frame. Four details, every one of them invisible once the job is finished.

A general roofer is a capable tradesman who fits a rooflight occasionally between re-roofs and gutter work. A window company sells a roof product as a line extension of something it knows better. We are neither. Rooflights are the work, every day, so the detailing is practised rather than recalled and the failure modes are familiar rather than theoretical.

It also changes what we notice on a survey. Rafter depth and spacing, whether there is an underlay beneath the covering, how a valley behind a parapet discharges, whether the truss webs in a modern roof can take the opening you want without a designed alteration. Those decide the specification, and they are established in the roof space rather than from a photograph of the front of the house.

From enquiry to installation

The sequence does not vary much, and it starts away from the product.

The building first. What it is, how old the roof is, and whether any designation attaches to the address. On a post-war estate this takes minutes. On a listed building or inside a conservation area it is the whole of the early work, because it changes what you are permitted to fit.

Then the roof. A survey inside and out: structure, covering, condition, and the insulation build-up the finished room needs. On a replacement, that includes the existing opening and the timber around it, because a new unit set onto an unsound upstand inherits every existing defect.

Then the specification, and only then the price. Unit, glazing chosen for the orientation of that slope, opening method chosen for how the room will be used, flashing kit matched to the covering. A figure quoted before those steps is a guess, and guesses move once the roof is open. Ours is written against a specification, so it holds unless you change what you asked for.

Then the installation. The opening is formed, the unit is set, the covering is dressed back around new flashings, and the roof is left watertight and secure at the end of each day rather than at the end of the job. We tell you at survey how many days the roof will be open, and if that changes you hear it from us first.

The boundary of our work

Our scope is new installations and replacements. Where an existing unit has yellowed, misted, jammed or is letting water in, it comes out and a new one goes in, with new flashings and a new upstand where the original will not carry one. That is a replacement installation, done once. It is a deliberate boundary, set because doing one thing to a consistent standard is easier to guarantee than doing everything to a variable one.

The same boundary means we sometimes tell people that their job is not ours. If water is coming in around a chimney stack and not the rooflight, if a covering has reached the end of its life and needs replacing wholesale, if the structural work for a loft conversion has to be designed before any glass goes near the roof, we will say so and point you at the trade that handles it. Nobody enjoys the call where the honest answer loses the job. It is still cheaper for you than finding out later.

We are installers, not the local authority. Where a determination on planning, listed building consent or a conservation matter is needed, that belongs to the council and we do not present ourselves as the people who decide. What we will tell you is the kind of position your building is likely to be in and which specification usually satisfies it. Where you are working with an architect or a heritage consultant, we install to their drawings.

The guarantee, in plain terms

Our workmanship carries a ten-year guarantee. It covers what we did: the opening, the upstand, the flashings, the way the covering is dressed back and terminated, and the setting of the unit. Coverage and exclusions are written out on their own page rather than compressed into small print, because a guarantee you cannot read before you buy is not much of a guarantee.

It sits alongside, and separate from, the manufacturer’s warranty on the unit itself: two different things, from two parties, covering two kinds of failure. We explain which is which at quotation rather than letting the distinction surface at the point somebody needs it.

Building Control notification is handled as part of the job. A new rooflight is notifiable work under the Building Regulations, and that notification is ours to make rather than yours to chase, included in the price rather than added afterwards.

Twenty five miles by road

We work from Oxford outwards, to 25 miles measured by road rather than across a map, because a van drives roads. That takes in Abingdon, Witney, Bicester, Kidlington, Didcot, Thame, Wantage, Woodstock, Chipping Norton and Banbury with the villages between them, and it crosses county lines. It also crosses several planning authorities, which is worth knowing before you read advice written for one of them and apply it to another.

The building stock inside that radius is genuinely varied, and it changes the specification rather than just the setting. Cotswold stone slate laid in diminishing courses, Welsh slate on Victorian terraces, plain clay tile on inter-war stock and concrete interlocking tile across the post-war estates each want different detailing at the perimeter of a unit. Where a building is older, sits in a conservation area or is listed, that changes what may be fitted and what it has to look like: usually a flush unit set into the plane of the roof, finished dark, with the covering re-dressed around it rather than a frame sat on top. That comes up often enough in this county to be ordinary work rather than a special case.

What we cannot show yet

There are no customer reviews on this site. The testimonial section is built, designed and sitting empty, and it stays empty until real customers have written something we can put in it. We will not write those words ourselves or buy them from anybody, so it is a gap only time and finished work can close.

That is worth saying directly. Trade sites carry praise as standard, and a reader has no way of telling which of it is real. Rather than add to that, here is what we can put in front of you: a guarantee whose terms you can read before you spend anything, a notification obligation we take off your hands, fifteen years of doing one job, and the technical pages on this site, written to show the working rather than to rank. Read a few. If we did not understand roofs, it would show quickly.

Then ask us hard questions at survey. What the upstand height will be and why, what the flashing detail is for your covering, what happens if the timber under the existing unit turns out to be wet, and what the guarantee does and does not cover. The answers will tell you more about whether to use us than any review would.