Rooflights and skylights fitted in Pant-yr-Awel

Pant-yr-Awel lies within Bridgend County Borough, and Bridgend County Borough Council is the planning authority for every address in it. By road it is 25.49 miles from Swansea, to the east, which keeps it comfortably within reach of us.

Several villages lie close around it. Blackmill, Llangeinor, Ogmore Vale and Bettws are all nearby, and we fit rooflights in each of them.

What the housing looks like on any one street is something we will not guess at from a desk. Houses in south Wales come in many ages and shapes, and a loft conversion from one decade can sit beside a flat-roofed extension from another. For that reason the useful way to talk about a house is by its roof.

Start with a pitched roof that has loft space under it. A roof window set into the slope brings daylight to a bedroom, a bathroom or a study, and it can be a top-hung type that opens at the bottom edge or a centre-pivot type that turns for cleaning. Next comes a flat roof, which usually means an extension. A kerbed rooflight or a lantern lets daylight fall into a room that has windows on one side only. Finally, a pitched roof over an unused loft can still serve a landing, because a sun tunnel gives the hall below a source of light of its own.

Reach is a practical question that gets forgotten. A unit within arm's length can be cleaned from inside, whereas one over a stairwell or a tall extension needs a plan for how it will be opened and wiped. Opening type, coating and position are best discussed together for that reason.

Which of these suits a house depends on the pitch, the covering, the structure beneath and the room below. Each of those is looked at in the free survey, which comes before any price.

Wales publishes a map of conservation-area boundaries. One of them, Llangeinor, has an edge roughly 425 m from the reference point we use for Pant-yr-Awel. A boundary on a map is not a survey of individual houses, so the question for any address is whether it sits inside the line, and the answer comes from Bridgend County Borough Council, which also has its own building control service for the village, or from its conservation and design page.

The reason it matters is that Welsh rules differ from English ones here. In Wales a new rooflight on the roof slope of a house inside a conservation area needs a planning application, so the work waits for the council's consent. Outside conservation areas, a house can fall under permitted development if the rooflight meets the limits in our planning guide for skylights in Wales.

The village is outside any AONB, which leaves that second form of protection out of the picture.

Some starting points differ. If your home is a flat or maisonette, permitted development simply does not apply to it. A house can have lost its rights through an Article 4 direction or through a condition on its original permission. And a listed house calls for listed building consent where a rooflight would touch its special character; the application goes to the local planning authority, and Cadw, the Welsh Government's historic environment service, advises. Consent can reach work inside the building as well as outside it, and small jobs are not automatically excused. Anyone who suspects the house is listed can check before booking anything.

The council's planning team can be asked for a view on your own case. A Lawful Development Certificate turns that view into a formal document, and it stays with the property afterwards.

Building Regulations have their own rules, and they apply whether planning permission is needed or not. Cutting a fresh opening into a roof generally brings the need for approval, in part because the structure must be able to carry the new weight. Replacing a window counts as building work even in the same hole; a repair alone does not. Where the notification is needed, we make it to Bridgend's building control or to a registered approver, and you pick between them.

Every room asks something different of a piece of roof glass, so it helps to take them one at a time.

On a landing with no window, daylight can arrive from the roof instead. A sun tunnel gathers it at a small dome, carries it down a reflective tube and releases it through a diffuser in the ceiling. Water drains off a dome of that size with no trouble.

A bathroom under the slope wants a roof window and an extractor that is used. In an existing home, the new or replacement roof window should have a U-value no worse than 1.4 W/m²K, or Window Energy Rating Band B, under Approved Document L (Wales). Our pages on roof windows and energy-efficient rooflights go through the glass options.

A flat-roofed extension has two candidates: the roof lantern or the flat roof rooflight. Flat glass keeps a low profile. A lantern brings height inside the room and sheds rain down pitched sides. For the lantern, we would agree the energy figure with you at survey, and the planning position with the council, since a lantern is a taller structure than a flat rooflight. The 2.2 W/m²K limit applies to a rooflight in the Approved Document sense.

Flat and curved glass rooflights from VELUX come with double or triple glazing, and the maker links that choice to both warmth and sound. It is one more item to talk through once we have seen how the room is used.

A bedroom under the roof raises the question of opening. Electric opening rooflights can be told to close by a rain sensor on VELUX's electric and solar models, so a window left open for air shuts itself when the weather changes.

When an older unit clouds inside, with mist trapped between its panes, the seal has usually gone. Misted rooflights can be swapped, and on a VELUX the size code on the type sign tells you what to match. Booking is simple: the survey costs nothing, the quote you receive afterwards is fixed and written, and the workmanship guarantee of 10 years goes on paper. Ring 01792 929062 or use the enquiry form.