Skylight Installation in Ravenswood
- Fixed quote before we start
- Roof never left open overnight
- 10-year workmanship guarantee
- Fixed quote before we start
- 10 years workmanship guarantee
- 25 years fitting rooflights
- Skylights only, not a general roofer
Ravenswood was built on the former Ipswich Airport site, and everything that went up there dates from the 2000s onward. That gives it something no older part of Ipswich has: a roof stock that is almost entirely modern prefabricated trussed rafter construction, built to a design, delivered to site on a lorry and craned into place. It is a completely different job from a Victorian cut roof, and the difference is not cosmetic.
The site sits roughly 1.8 miles south-east of the town centre in a straight line, so a short hop for us, usually well under twenty minutes.
A truss is not a rafter, and that is the whole argument
A traditional cut roof is built on site from loose timber. Rafters, purlins, a ridge. If you want an opening you cut a rafter, put trimmers across, double up either side, and the load finds its way around the hole. Roofers have done it that way for two hundred years.
A prefabricated truss is an engineered component. It arrives as a complete triangle with internal webs, joined at every node with a punched metal nail plate, and it was calculated as one indivisible unit. Every web is in tension or compression. The whole thing works because it is closed.
Cut one web and you have not made a hole. You have changed the load path of the roof. The forces that member was carrying go somewhere else, into joints and timbers that were never sized for them, and the failure will not be dramatic on the day. It shows up as deflection, cracked ceilings and a spreading roof over years.
Plainly: nobody should cut a truss web to make a rooflight fit. Not us, not a general builder, not a handy relative. If the opening genuinely needs to be bigger than the trusses allow, it needs a structural engineer and a designed alteration, and that is a real cost with a real drawing behind it.
Truss centres cap the width of your rooflight
Trussed roofs are normally set out at 600mm centres. Take off the truss thickness and the fixing tolerance and you are left with a clear space between them that puts a hard ceiling on unit width if the roof is to stay untouched.
So on Ravenswood stock the conversation goes one of two ways:
- Between the trusses, untouched. A roof window sized to fit the clear gap, flashed into the covering, no structural work, no engineer. Quick, clean, and the price is straightforward. This is the right answer for the large majority of these roofs. See pitched roof skylight installation.
- A designed alteration. New trimmers, new support to redirect the load, signed off by a structural engineer before anything is cut. Available, legitimate, and considerably more involved. Worth it occasionally. Not worth it to gain 200mm.
The honest answer on a trussed roof is often “you can have this size, not that size, unless you want an engineer involved.” Where the achievable gap does not match a catalogue size, a unit built to the surveyed opening is the way through, which is what the custom skylight design service exists for. Two narrower units in adjacent bays often give more usable daylight than one wide one, and they cost less than an engineer.
Attic trusses behave differently, so check which you have
Some newer estate housing is built with room-in-roof attic trusses rather than standard fink trusses. These are designed from the outset with a clear span through the middle, so there is a usable habitable volume in the roof and no web running through where you want to stand.
If you have them your options widen, because the structure already anticipates a room up there. With standard fink trusses the loft is a storage void full of diagonal timber, and no amount of enthusiasm changes that without an engineer. You can tell in a minute through the hatch. A clear rectangular space with the webs pushed to the edges means attic trusses. A dense W of timber across the middle means fink.
The failure here is not the roof, it is the first-generation units
These roofs are young and well insulated. What is reaching end of life on the earliest phases of the site is the rooflights themselves. Units fitted in the early 2000s are now twenty-odd years old, and that is roughly where sealed units and gaskets give up.
The symptoms are consistent. Misting between the panes that never clears, condensation on the inside of the frame, draughts around the sash. That is the sealed unit failing and the gasket perishing. There is nothing to reseal and we do not offer patching on any job. It gets replaced.
The upside is thermal. An early-2000s unit sits at roughly 2.8 W/m²K. A current one is around 1.2. On a well-insulated modern house the old rooflight is often the worst element in the whole envelope, and swapping it changes how a cold room feels. Numbers on energy efficient skylight installation. Where the original opening was a standard size these are straightforward VELUX, Keylite or Roto swaps.
The airfield site went up in phases, and the roofs moved with them
Ravenswood was not built in one go. It rolled out across the site in phases from the early 2000s, and the construction detail crept forward as it went. The earliest phases carry the first-generation rooflights that are now failing, standard fink trusses and a breathable membrane that was near the start of its widespread use. Later phases increasingly arrived with room-in-roof provision on some house types, better airtightness targets, and in the newest corners a fair number of roofs came with solar panels designed in rather than bolted on afterwards. So the age of your phase is a decent predictor of what we will find in the loft, and it is the first thing we ask.
Solar panels change where the rooflight can go
A good proportion of these roofs carry PV, either from new or retrofitted since. That matters for a rooflight in two ways. First, the array occupies the best part of the south-facing slope, which is often the same slope you wanted daylight from, so the unit has to find room around the panels without the array shading it or the rooflight overshadowing the array. Second, there is cabling and there are roof anchors under the tiles that we need to keep clear of when we form the opening and dress the flashing. None of it rules a rooflight out. It just means the survey looks at the panel layout and the fixings as carefully as it looks at the trusses, and on a roof with a full array the sensible answer is sometimes a unit on the opposite pitch where nothing is competing for the space.
An airtight house needs somewhere for the air to go
The other thing that comes with a modern Ravenswood house is airtightness. These were built to hold heat, with sealed construction and, on some plots, mechanical ventilation with heat recovery moving air around the house. That is efficient, but it means a room does not leak stale air the way an old house does, and a converted loft or a top-floor bedroom can feel stuffy on a still day. An openable rooflight, particularly one set high where the warm air collects, gives you a real purge vent: crack it and the stack effect pulls fresh air up through the house. Where the unit is out of easy reach we specify a motorised opener with a rain sensor, which is covered under electric skylight installation. On a house running mechanical ventilation we take care not to fight the system, so the rooflight complements the background ventilation rather than short-circuiting it.
Getting a price on the former airport site
We survey in the loft as well as on the roof, because on a trussed roof the loft is where the answer is. One fixed written price after that, a 10-year workmanship guarantee, installed to current Building Regulations.
The same applies across the south-east side of town at Purdis Farm, Nacton and Kesgrave, which has a lot of the same modern roof construction. Everywhere else is on areas we cover.
Request a fixed quote for a rooflight in Ravenswood. A photograph up through the loft hatch tells us more than anything else you can send.
Can you cut a truss to fit a bigger rooflight?
No, and neither should anyone else. A prefabricated truss is engineered as a closed triangle and every web carries a calculated load. Cutting one redirects those forces into joints and timbers never sized for them, and the result shows up later as deflection and cracked ceilings rather than a failure on the day. If the opening has to be bigger than the trusses allow, the roof needs a designed alteration with new trimmers and support signed off by a structural engineer.
Why is my rooflight width limited on a Ravenswood house?
Because trussed roofs are typically set out at 600mm centres, and once you account for the truss thickness and fitting tolerance the clear gap between them is what your unit has to fit within if the structure stays untouched. That caps the width. It does not cap the length up the slope, so a taller unit often gets you the daylight you wanted, and two units in adjacent bays usually beats paying an engineer to gain a few hundred millimetres.
Our rooflight from the early 2000s has gone cloudy. Can it be fixed?
No. Permanent misting between the panes means the sealed unit has failed, and at twenty years the gaskets have generally perished as well. There is no reseal that addresses either, and we do not offer repairs or patching. Replacement also drops the U-value from around 2.8 to about 1.2, which on a modern well-insulated house is a real difference because that unit is usually the weakest part of the whole roof.
We have solar panels. Can we still have a rooflight?
Yes, but the array shapes the answer. Panels usually take the best south-facing slope, and there is cabling and there are roof anchors under the tiles that we work around when forming the opening. We survey the panel layout alongside the trusses, keep the unit clear of the array so neither shades the other, and where the panelled slope is full the better result is often a rooflight on the opposite pitch. It is a positioning question, not a reason to give up on the idea.
Our loft room feels stuffy. Would an opening rooflight help?
Very likely. These houses are built airtight to hold heat, so rooms do not shed stale air the way older stock does. An openable rooflight set high in the slope gives a genuine purge vent, and the stack effect draws fresh air up through the house when you open it. Where it is out of reach we fit a motorised opener with a rain sensor. If the house runs mechanical ventilation with heat recovery we make sure the rooflight works with it rather than against it.
How do I tell which phase of Ravenswood my house is in, and does it matter?
The build year on your paperwork or the deeds is the quickest guide, and it matters because the earliest phases carry the first-generation rooflights now reaching the end of their life, while the later phases tend to have better airtightness, occasional room-in-roof trusses and, in the newest corners, integrated solar. It changes what we expect to find before we are even on the roof. It does not change the survey, which we do regardless, but it does mean we arrive with a good idea of whether yours is a straightforward replacement or a fresh opening in a panelled, airtight roof.
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.