Rooflight Questions Answered

Short questions, answered properly

These are the questions we are actually asked, written down with the answer given first and the reasoning after it. Where the honest answer is “it depends on your roof”, that is what it says, followed by what it depends on, so you can work out which side of the line your own building falls.

Some of these answers will talk you out of something. A few of them talk people out of using us, usually because the work they want is outside what we install. That is a better outcome for everybody than a survey that ends the same way.

The three that come up most

Whether you need permission is the first question for most people, and the answer turns on designation rather than on the product. Listed buildings need consent, front-facing slopes in conservation areas usually do, and a rear slope on an undesignated house is usually permitted development. The word usually is doing real work in that sentence, which is why there is a page for each case.

Whether it will leak is the second, and the honest answer is that a correctly installed rooflight in a correctly detailed roof does not. Water gets in at the perimeter, not through the unit, and the perimeter is entirely within the installer’s control.

What it costs is the third. The figures on these pages are ranges rather than quotations, because the structural work above the ceiling is what moves a price, and nobody can see that from a photograph of your kitchen.

If your question is not here

Send it. Questions that keep arriving get written up and added, so asking an unlisted one is genuinely useful rather than an imposition.