Skylight installation in Worthing, fitted for a south-coast winter

Skylight and rooflight installation in Worthing

Shoreline Skylights installs and replaces skylights and rooflights across Worthing and about thirty miles around it. It is the whole of what we do. Not roofing with a rooflight page, not windows with a rooflight sideline: glass set into roofs, and the detailing that decides whether it still works in ten years.

Two words are used for the same thing and it is worth clearing up early, because it affects what you search for and what you are quoted. Skylight is what most homeowners say. Rooflight is what the trade says. In ordinary use they mean the same thing, and if you have arrived here looking for either, you are in the right place.

Where the trade does draw a line, it is between a unit that sits in the plane of a pitched roof, which is properly a roof window, and one that sits on a kerb above a flat roof, which is properly a rooflight. Different roofs, different weathering, different failure modes. Everything below assumes nothing about which you have.

Worthing is not one planning area, it is three

This is the part that decides whether a quotation is worth anything, and it is why we check with the authority before we price rather than after. Thirty miles from Worthing crosses seven planning authorities and three genuinely different building conditions.

What we install

Ten things, all of them glass set into a roof, and the right one follows from the roof you have rather than from the photograph you liked.

On a flat roof

Flat roof rooflights are the most common installation in this area by a wide margin, because the rear extension is the standard improvement and a flat roof is what most of them have. The unit sits on a timber kerb raised above the water line so the covering can be dressed up its face and terminated under the frame.

A roof lantern is a pitched glazed structure on that same kerb rather than a flat pane. It catches light from four directions, sheds water and dirt by its pitch, and gives a room real height above the ceiling line. It is the right answer over a kitchen extension or a main living space, and over a utility room it is money spent on the wrong room.

A walk-on rooflight is structure that happens to be transparent, used where a roof is also a floor: a terrace over a habitable room, or a light well that is also the route to a garden.

On a pitched roof

A roof window sits in the plane of the covering and is weathered by a flashing kit rather than a kerb. That kit is specific to the covering, and using the wrong profile is the single most common defect we are called out to correct.

VELUX is the name most people arrive with, and most of that work is replacement rather than new openings: reading the size code off the data plate, matching an obsolete size, specifying the right flashing kit for the roof you actually have.

By what you are trying to solve

Something has failed, and it is misted, leaking or simply thirty years old. That is replacement, and on this coast it is the most common call we take.

The room is too hot in summer or too cold in winter. That is a glass specification question and it lives on energy efficient rooflights.

You cannot reach it to open it, which on a flat roof is true by definition. That is electric and opening rooflights.

The room has no roof of its own, because there is a floor or a loft between it and the sky. That is a sun tunnel, and it is the only product that reaches an internal hallway or a windowless bathroom.

The four things that actually decide whether it lasts

Almost every rooflight problem we are called to traces back to one of these, and not one of them is the glazed unit.

Glass, and the one decision most often regretted

Two numbers matter and they pull in opposite directions. The U-value is how fast heat escapes; a modern unit with a low emissivity coating, argon fill and a warm edge spacer lands around 1.2 to 1.4, comfortably inside the 2.2 expected for a replacement. The g-value is how much solar energy comes through; clear double glazing is around 0.7, solar control around 0.4.

Overhead glass receives more solar energy than any other glass in a building, because in summer the sun is high and strikes it nearly square on. A south or west facing kitchen rooflight with clear glass is a greenhouse from about eleven in the morning, and on this coast a great many rear extensions face south towards the sea.

Solar control is the specification most often dropped to save money and by a wide margin the one most often regretted, because the only remedy afterwards is replacing the glass. On a north facing slope the opposite is true: there is no gain to control, north light is the best light in the building, and specifying solar control there simply makes a good room darker.

U-value is whole-unit and lower is better. The g-value is the share of solar energy let through, so lower means less summer heat and also less winter gain. Approved Document L sets 2.2 W/m²K as the limiting whole-unit U-value for a replacement rooflight in a dwelling; every option below is comfortably inside it.

The coastal specification, in detail

Everything south of the railway line is in salt air, and salt does not care what the brochure says. It is worth being specific about what actually fails, because the difference between a unit that lasts twenty five years on the seafront and one that looks tired in five is entirely decided at order.

Terraces, parapets and London roofs

Hove, Brighton, Heene and the older parts of Worthing carry a building type that behaves unlike anything on an estate, and it needs saying because the standard advice does not apply to it.

A Regency or Victorian terrace typically has a London roof: two shallow slopes falling inwards to a central valley gutter, hidden behind a parapet wall at the front. From the street you see no roof at all. From above you see a lead or felt-lined valley running the length of the terrace, often shared with the houses either side.

Three things follow. The front slope is usually invisible from the street, which is exactly the argument a conservation officer will accept for a rooflight there when they would refuse one on a visible slope. The valley gutter is a shared drainage route, so anything that obstructs it affects your neighbours and not only you. And the parapet means access is from inside or by scaffold, never from a ladder against the eaves, because there is no eaves to lean on.

We survey these from inside the roof space as well as from above. The question is rarely whether a rooflight will fit. It is whether the valley still runs freely once it is in, and whether the structure below the slope will take the opening without a new trimmer.

Access, scaffold and the Downs villages

Access is a real line on a quotation rather than a rounding error, and in this radius it varies more than the work itself does.

On a post-war estate at Durrington or Southwater the plots are generous, there is off-street parking, and a single storey flat roof is reached from a tower with no licence and no fuss. That is the cheapest access situation there is.

In a Downs village the lanes are narrow, frequently unadopted, and often the only place to stand a scaffold is the highway. That means a licence from West Sussex County Council as highway authority, a lead time measured in weeks rather than days, and a cost that is nothing to do with the rooflight. Steyning High Street, Amberley and Ditchling are all like this.

On the seafront the constraint is different again: exposure. A scaffold on an open clifftop at Rottingdean has to be tied and sheeted for wind that a sheltered inland site never sees, and there are days when it is simply not safe to be on the roof at all. We build that into the programme rather than discovering it on the morning.

None of this is a reason to avoid the job. It is a reason to survey it properly, and it is why an honest price cannot be given down the phone.

How we work

An indicative range by email first, free, usually the same day, from a description and a photograph. If you are replacing a roof window, a photograph of the data plate on the unit is the single most useful thing you can send: it usually gets you a price without anyone visiting.

Then a survey, also free, which looks at the roof build up, the opening, the structure around it, the fall, the access, and what sits in the ceiling below.

Then a fixed written price, itemised so you can see what is unit, what is labour, what is scaffold and what is the Building Control fee. It does not move afterwards. If we got something wrong at survey, that is ours to absorb.

The one thing we flag in advance rather than spring on you is decayed timber. A unit that has been failing for years has usually been letting a little water past for some of them, and where the risk looks higher than usual we say so at quotation with an indication of what it would add.

What we will not do is give a fixed price over the phone for a flat roof replacement. The kerb decides that job, and a price given without seeing it is a guess with a number attached.

Building Control and planning

Two different regimes, and a job can need one, both or neither.

A new opening is notifiable under Building Regulations. A replacement into the same opening usually is not, though the unit still has to meet the thermal standard. Where the work is notifiable we handle the notification and the completion certificate comes to you, which is the document a buyer’s solicitor asks for.

Planning permission is usually not required on a house, provided the rooflight does not project more than 150mm above the roof plane and sits no higher than the highest part of the roof. Inside the National Park and in a conservation area those rights are narrower, and it generally depends which slope. On a listed building, listed building consent is required regardless, and it is assessed on merit rather than granted as a formality.

Given how much of this radius is designated, we check before quoting rather than after.

Two separate regimes, and a job can need one, both or neither. Permitted development normally allows a rooflight that projects no more than 150mm beyond the plane of the existing roof and sits no higher than the highest part of it. Those rights are narrower on Article 2(3) land, which here means the whole of the South Downs National Park as well as every conservation area, which is why we check with the authority before quoting rather than afterwards.

What we will not claim

We do not name a trade body, an ombudsman, an accreditation or an insurance backed guarantee scheme, because we do not currently belong to one. We do not publish a review score, because we would rather show none than invent one.

What we will stand behind is a ten year workmanship guarantee with its limits written down, a fixed written price that does not move, Building Control handled where the work is notifiable, and a survey before anything is ordered. Those are on the guarantee page, including what it does not cover.

Where we work

Worthing and about thirty miles by road in every direction the roads allow: the borough itself, Adur and the Shoreham strip, Arun and the western coast, the South Downs National Park, Horsham district and the Weald, Brighton and Hove, and the Mid Sussex villages.

The radius is real rather than aspirational. We would rather decline a job the far side of Chichester than take it and give it the attention a two hour drive allows. The full list is on areas we cover, and every town has its own page describing what the roofs there are actually like.