Rooflight and skylight installation in Clacton-on-Sea

Specifying for the coast

Three adjustments, none expensive at the point of order and all difficult to add later.

Stainless fixings. Salt air corrodes plated fixings within a few years, and once a fixing has gone the flashing it held is loose. Stainless costs very little more.

A durable exterior finish. Aluminium clad timber units suit this environment well, because the cladding weathers and the timber behind stays dry. Where a manufacturer offers a higher durability coating as a coastal option, take it.

Weathering detail sized for driving rain. Wind driven water is pushed under a covering rather than running down it, so the underlay collar and the flashing kit carry almost the whole burden. A universal flashing kit that would be adequate in a sheltered inland position will let water past here, and it is exactly where a low quotation saves money.

On larger units and anything that opens, wind loading should be checked against the site rather than assumed. An open sash is a sail.

The Victorian and Edwardian stock

Steep pitches, cut roofs with rafters and purlins, and slate or clay tile coverings. Good roofs to work on: the pitch does much of the weathering work, openings can be formed without a trimmer in most cases, and the headroom gain from a roof window is generous.

What varies is what is underneath. A roof that has never been stripped may have no underlay at all, and modern weathering assumes a membrane to lap into. Where there is none, the detail is built around the opening. Normal, more work, and it belongs in the quotation.

Many of these are three storey properties or converted into flats. Two things follow. Access at that height means scaffold rather than a tower, which is a real line. And flats have no permitted development rights at all, so any rooflight in a flat needs a planning application and usually the freeholder’s consent as well.

Interwar and post war housing

Where most of our Clacton work is. Concrete interlocking tiles, pitches around 30 to 35 degrees, cut roofs on the earlier properties and trussed rafters from the 1970s onward.

The cut against trussed distinction decides more about the price than the choice of window does. Rafters with a purlin and clear space between is a cut roof and a wide opening is ordinary carpentry. Triangular frames with diagonal webs joined by flat steel plates is trussed, and opening width is limited to the 600mm truss spacing unless a designed trimmer is installed. A photograph looking up in the loft answers it without a visit.

Profiled interlocking tiles need a deep flashing kit rather than the flat kit used on slate. Ask any quoting installer which kit is specified for your covering by name.

Bungalows

Clacton has a lot of them, and a bungalow is a genuinely different proposition. The roof area is large relative to the rooms, so daylight can go where it works best rather than where it fits. Every room is under the roof, which means internal bathrooms and hallways can have a sun tunnel. And access is easy, because single storey eaves are reachable from a tower, which removes the line that most often surprises people on a quotation.

Vaulting a ceiling is the most transformative thing that can be done to a bungalow room, and rooflights in the pitched plane are what make it work. It needs structural attention, because the ceiling joists in a cut roof are usually acting as ties, and cutting them out without a ridge beam or collar arrangement lets the roof spread.

Replacement work

A large and growing share of what we do here, because a lot of units went in during the 1980s and 1990s and sealed units last fifteen to twenty five years. Coastal exposure tends to bring that toward the shorter end.

Photograph the data plate on the sash before anything else. From that we can usually tell you what the unit is, whether the size is still made, and what the job costs, without a visit. Obsolete sizes are normal and solvable, usually by adapting the opening to the nearest current size and making good the reveal.

Access and coverage

Variable by area: easy on the interwar and post war roads with driveways and space for a tower, tighter in the older seafront streets where parking is limited and scaffold may need a highway licence.

We plan Clacton work as full days rather than short visits. If there is more than one thing that needs doing, say so at the enquiry stage, because access is a fixed cost shared across everything done on the same visit.

Sizing

Glazed area around 15 to 20 percent of floor area gives a bright room without turning it into a greenhouse. The common error is going straight to the largest unit that fits.

On a south or west facing extension, a very large rooflight without solar control glass produces a room nobody uses in July, and the fix afterwards costs nearly as much as the original installation. Moderate glazing with better glass, plus an opening unit at the highest point so heat can leave, gives a better room than more glass does.

Maintenance on the coast

Keep the perimeter clear, check the outlet the roof drains to, clean the gasket annually so the sash seats properly, and rinse salt deposits off any exposed finish once or twice a year. Check the fixings and flashing after storms for lifted edges or rust staining, which indicates a plated fixing failing.