Skylight Installation in Holland-on-Sea

Holland-on-Sea is bungalow country, and that single fact rewrites the brief. In a two-storey house a rooflight tops up daylight that windows already provide. In a single-storey house with a deep plan, the middle of the building has no external wall to borrow from, and the roof is the only place daylight can come from. The rooflight is the entire daylighting strategy for that room, and if it is under-specified you feel it every day of the year.

It is 17.5 miles from Ipswich as the crow flies, so about forty-five to fifty minutes on the road depending on the run through Colchester. The frontage here faces open water with nothing in the way, which sets the fixing and coating specification before we have even looked at the roof.

Flat-roof rooflights: the upstand does the work

Most of the interesting work here happens on flat-roof rear extensions, and on a flat roof the rooflight does not sit in the covering. It sits on a kerb, and the kerb is what keeps the water out.

Height matters more than people expect. A kerb of around 150mm is fine on a sheltered inland roof. On a frontage taking driven rain off open sea, water does not fall onto the deck, it arrives sideways and drives up the face of the upstand. We build higher than the minimum here, and the membrane is dressed up the full face of the kerb and turned over the top under the unit flange, not stopped short and sealed. Sealant at that junction is a delay, not a weathering detail.

Falls are the other half of it. A flat roof is never actually flat, or it should not be. Where a rooflight sits in the middle of a small deck it interrupts the run, and water that used to cross that area now has to go round it. So we check the falls either side still take water to the outlet, and that the unit is not sitting in the natural low spot. Ponding against a kerb is how a perfectly good rooflight ends up leaking in its fourth winter.

Roof lanterns on rear extensions

A roof lantern is the obvious move on a single-storey rear extension, and on a bungalow it is often the right one, because a raised lantern pulls light from more of the sky than a flush unit lying in the deck. The constraint is structural. A lantern is heavier than a flush rooflight, it wants a properly formed and level kerb, and the opening has to be trimmed so the loads go into something that can carry them. On a lightly built extension roof that may mean a smaller lantern than the room would ideally like.

Where a lantern is not right, a large flush unit on a well-built upstand does the same daylighting job with a lower profile. That is standard flat roof rooflight installation and it suits low-slope decks that cannot take the weight or the height.

Solar gain, and why the glass specification is not a detail

This is the part that gets skipped on bungalows and then causes trouble. A large rooflight on a south-facing single-storey roof is pointed almost directly at the summer sun for most of the middle of the day. Overhead glazing collects far more solar energy than the same area of vertical window, because the sun is above it rather than beside it. Put a generous lantern over a south-facing kitchen with no thought given to the glass and the room will run hot from May to September.

The number that governs this is the g-value, the fraction of solar energy the glazing lets through. A standard clear double-glazed unit might sit around 0.6, meaning most of the heat comes in. A solar-control coating pulls that well down while keeping the light transmission high, so the room stays bright without cooking. On large south-facing units we specify solar control as a matter of course, and we say so at survey rather than letting it become an optional extra nobody thinks about until July.

The U-value is the winter half of the same conversation, and on a bungalow, where the roof is a large share of the heat-loss envelope, it shows on the bill. There is more on both numbers under energy efficient skylight installation.

Ventilation is worth building in

An openable unit gives you a way of dumping heat at the top of the room, which is exactly where it collects. On a bungalow with no upstairs to draw air through, that is more useful than it sounds. Where the unit is out of reach over a lantern or high in a vaulted ceiling, an electric rooflight with a rain sensor is the sensible version, because a manual pole gets used twice and then never again.

Holland-on-Sea stock, and why it is bungalow country

Holland-on-Sea filled in through the interwar and post-war decades as a low-rise seaside suburb, and the result is street after street of single-storey housing: interwar bungalows with shallow hipped tile roofs, post-war bungalows on more standard forms, and later flat-roofed rear extensions added across the lot as families needed more room. The frontage runs from the cliff top down towards Holland Haven, open to the North Sea with nothing in the way. That combination, single-storey deep-plan housing on a fully exposed coast, is what makes the daylighting argument on this page matter so much. In a bungalow the roof is the only place the middle of the house can borrow light from, and it is also the surface taking the worst of the weather.

Because the stock is so consistent, the jobs rhyme. A deep interwar bungalow with a dark central hall or a back kitchen is the classic Holland problem, and a well-sized, well-placed rooflight or lantern changes how the whole house lives. The specification has to carry the daylighting, the summer heat, the winter heat loss and the coastal exposure all at once, which is more than a single-storey roof is usually asked to do.

Pitch and orientation decide the daylight

Where the rooflight goes on a bungalow roof is not a free choice, and it changes the result more than the size does. On a shallow hipped roof the available slope is limited by the hips, and a unit set too high runs out of tile margin while one set too low throws light only at the floor near the wall. Orientation matters just as much. A north-facing slope gives even, steady daylight with very little solar gain, which is the easy case. A south-facing slope gives the brightest light and the summer heat problem this page describes, so the glass specification has to do more work. An east or west slope brings low-angle morning or evening sun that a flush unit handles better than a steep lantern face. We set the position against the room and the compass at survey, because a lantern in the wrong place is an expensive way to light a corner nobody sits in.

The falls come into it too. On a flat-roofed rear extension the natural low point of the deck is exactly where you do not want the unit, because that is where water gathers and gets driven against the kerb. We position the rooflight clear of the low spot and check the falls still carry water to the outlet around it, rather than dropping a unit into the middle of a deck and inheriting a ponding problem.

Ventilation deserves more than a footnote on a bungalow, because heat and stale air collect at the ceiling with no upstairs to draw them away. An openable rooflight gives that heat somewhere to go, and on a single-storey plan it doubles as a way of pulling cooler air through the house on a still summer evening. Where the unit sits high over a lantern or in a vaulted ceiling, a manual pole gets used once and then forgotten, so an electrically operated unit with a rain sensor is the version that actually earns its keep, because the sensor closes it when the weather turns, which on this frontage it does quickly. There is a related point about condensation. A bungalow roof is a large share of the heat-loss envelope, so a warm-edge spacer and a thermally broken frame are not only a Part L matter, they keep the inner face of the unit warm enough that moist kitchen air does not run down it as condensation in winter. Blaming the glass for that is common and usually wrong; it is nearly always the frame edge running cold. We specify against both the summer and the winter case at once, because on a bungalow you live with the result in every room the roof lights.

Getting a price

Every skylight installation in Holland-on-Sea starts with a survey on the roof, and the quote is fixed in writing after it. The installers have twenty-five years in the trade, every job carries a 10-year workmanship guarantee, and the work goes in to current Building Regulations.

We cover the same coastline at Clacton-on-Sea, Frinton-on-Sea and Walton-on-the-Naze. The full list is on areas we cover.

Request a fixed quote. Tell us the room, roughly which way the roof faces, and whether the deck is flat or pitched, and we can narrow the specification before the survey.