Apex Skylights Ipswich installs skylights and rooflights across Ipswich, Suffolk and north Essex. New installations and full replacements. That is the entire business.
The installers doing the work have 25 years in the trade behind them. The company itself is new, and we would rather say that than imply a trading history we do not have. What is not new is the hands: two and a half decades of upstands, flashings, trimmed rafters and hose tests, on this coast and in these towns.
Skylights only, and why that is deliberate
Most firms that fit rooflights in this region fit other things too. General roofers do re-roofs and gutters and take a rooflight when it comes up. Glazing companies do windows and doors and treat a lantern as a line item on a bigger quote. Some outfits do roofing, solar, doors and pet flaps from the same van.
The problem with that is repetition, or the lack of it. A general roofer might fit eight or ten rooflights in a year. We fit them every week. The difference does not show up on an easy job. It shows up on the third-time-of-asking jobs: a deep-profile pantile roof where the standard flashing kit will not seat, a 1950s shallow pitch in Chantry with joists nobody documented, a Georgian property in Woodbridge where the conservation officer has a view, a flat roof at Felixstowe that has been fighting horizontal rain for forty years.
Nine services, all of them the same fundamental job. Roof lanterns, flat roof rooflights, pitched roof skylights, VELUX and equivalent roof windows, electric opening units, energy-efficient specification, commercial rooflights, custom design and polycarbonate. All of them are a hole in a roof with glass in it and weathering round the edge. Nothing else. You will not be sold a conservatory, and we will not quote for your fascias.
The east-coast problem nobody else is specifying for
Rooflight systems are sold nationally to a single specification. That specification is written for inland conditions, and it does not survive this coastline well.
Within roughly a mile of open sea, from Southwold and Aldeburgh down through Felixstowe and Harwich to Clacton, Frinton and the Blackwater, three things happen faster than the manufacturer’s testing anticipates. Chloride from salt-laden air deposits on every exposed surface. Wind-driven rain arrives horizontally, attacking the vertical face of an upstand and the underside of flashing laps rather than falling on the glass. And the wetting and drying cycle keeps chloride concentrated at fixing heads instead of rinsing it away.
The visible result is a grade 304 stainless screw showing rust staining down a frame within two or three winters. It is entirely avoidable and almost nobody local specifies against it. On open-coast work we use 316L stainless throughout, marine-specification powder coating, upstands at 200mm rather than 150mm, mechanically fixed flashing terminations and proper isolation between dissimilar metals.
The other half of that honesty is refusing to oversell it. Woodbridge, Melton, Manningtree, Wivenhoe, Shotley and Pin Mill sit on tidal saline water with real wind exposure, but they are not the open sea. Upgraded fixings there, not a full marine package. Writing “full North Sea exposure” for an estuary town would be a false claim, and it would undermine the specification everywhere it genuinely matters. The bands are published on our areas we cover page.
We replace. We do not patch.
No repairs, no resealing, no patching, on anything. This loses us work and we keep the policy anyway.
The arithmetic is straightforward. A reseal on a failed rooflight costs a few hundred pounds and typically buys twelve to eighteen months. It does not address the blown sealed units, the perished gaskets, or the wet timber inside an upstand that has been taking water for three years, which is normally the real problem by the time a stain appears on a ceiling. Repeat it three times over five years and you have spent a meaningful fraction of a replacement while the decay carries on underneath. Meanwhile the unit from 2005 sits at a U-value around 2.8 to 3.2 W/m²K against roughly 1.3 for a current one, so the room stays cold as well as wet.
If a repair genuinely is the right call on your unit, we will say so and point you elsewhere. We just will not take money for one.
Two commitments we hold to
The fixed quote
We survey on the roof. Structure, fall, covering condition, orientation, exposure band, access. You get one written price, itemised, with the glazing specification and the U-value stated on it. That figure does not move unless you change what you are asking for.
Mid-job price increases happen because the survey was inadequate, not because the roof was unlucky. If your roof has rotten decking, a covering at the end of its life, or structure that will not carry the lantern you want, you hear about it at survey, while you can still walk away for nothing. That is a much better conversation than the one that starts with a scaffold already up.
The ranges those quotes come from are published on our costs page, which no other installer in Suffolk does.
The 10-year workmanship guarantee
Ten years on our workmanship, in writing, handed over at completion, transferable if you sell the house. That covers the upstand, the weathering, the flashing, the fixings and the installation. The unit carries the manufacturer’s own warranty on top, and we hand that documentation over at the same time.
Fitted watertight. Guaranteed. We hose test every completed installation and walk you round the detail, not just the finished interior view. The workmanship lives at the upstand and the flashing, so that is what we show you.
Why choose Apex
The reasons to put us on your roof are all things you can check.
- 25 years in the trade. The installers doing the work have two and a half decades of upstands, flashings, trimmed rafters and hose tests behind them, on this coast and in these towns.
- Skylights only. We fit rooflights every week, not eight or ten a year between re-roofs and gutter work, so the detailing that decides whether a job leaks in five years is the thing we do most.
- Experienced with the major brands. We are experienced VELUX, Keylite and Roto installers and fit those products constantly.
- East-coast weather expertise. We specify for salt, chloride and driven rain because we work in it every week, and we know when a roof genuinely needs the full marine package and when it does not.
- A fixed quote and a 10-year workmanship guarantee. One written price that does not move unless you change the specification, and ten years on the workmanship in writing, transferable if you sell the house.
- The roof never left open overnight, and honest advice throughout. If a repair or a cheaper option is genuinely the right call for you, we will say so, even when it costs us the work.
Building Control, handled for you
Where your job is notifiable, we handle the Building Control notification for you as a building notice or full plans application. That means the paperwork is dealt with properly, an independent Building Control officer inspects the work, and you have a compliant completion certificate in your file at the end, which is exactly the document a conveyancing solicitor asks for when you sell. We tell you at survey which route your job needs and we work to the inspector’s requirements.
How we work as a business
Service-area business. No shop, no showroom, no trade counter, no postal address to visit. Everything we do happens on your roof, so overhead goes into the van and the specification rather than into premises you would end up paying for.
The trading area is roughly 30 miles from Ipswich: most of Suffolk, north Essex down to Colchester and the Blackwater, and the Norfolk edge at Diss and Harleston. Beyond that we start declining work, and we say why on the areas page. A rooflight is not a one-visit job. It is a survey, a made-to-measure delivery, two to four days on site, and then a ten-year guarantee that we have to be able to honour quickly. At 45 miles each way we would be slower to come out, and a guarantee we would be slow to service is not much of a guarantee.
What you can expect
- A survey on the roof, not a price over the phone
- One written fixed price with the specification and U-value on it
- Nothing ordered until it is measured, nothing opened until the unit is in stock
- The roof watertight by the end of the first day, and never open overnight
- A hose test and a walk round the detail at handover
- Ten years of workmanship guarantee, in writing
- A straight answer when the answer is awkward
Talk to us
Tell us the room, the roof and roughly where you are. The nine things we install are listed on the services page, real price ranges are on the costs page, and the awkward questions are answered on the FAQs.
Request a fixed quote for skylight installation in Ipswich, Suffolk or north Essex.
Thinking about this job? We survey across Ipswich, Suffolk and north Essex and give you a fixed price before any work starts, with a 10-year workmanship guarantee.