Skylights and rooflights in Coedhirwaun

Coedhirwaun lies south-east of Swansea, 14.21 miles by road, comfortably inside the area we serve. Neath Port Talbot Council is its local authority. Nearby places that we also work in include Pyle, Cefn Cribwr, South Cornelly and Llangynwyd.

Guidance on rooflights usually starts with the house type, and there is a general version of it that fits here as it fits anywhere. Older terraces tend to have pitched roofs covered in slate or tile, with a back slope that is usually the only place a window can go without being seen from the street. Semis and detached houses from the middle of the last century and after have tiled slopes with more width to them. These are house types, not a description of one place.

Extensions are where flat roofs come in. A kitchen pushed out at the back, a garage turned into a utility room or a dining space added to the side will each have a roof of its own, and that roof is usually low in pitch or flat. It is the easiest place to add daylight and the easiest to get wrong if the fall is neglected.

Roof windows, rooflights, lanterns and tunnels are each right for some roofs and wrong for others. The roof at your house is the only one that matters, and no product gets recommended until someone has looked at it and at the room beneath. That visit is free and comes before any figure.

If you already have a rooflight that is giving trouble, tell us what it does: drips, clouds, puddles or sticks. That points to which of the causes above is at work and saves a wasted trip up the ladder.

It also helps to know what the rooms below need. A bedroom wants a window that can be opened for air and closed against rain. A bathroom wants glass that does not run with condensation. A dining area built onto the back of a house usually wants as much daylight as the roof can give. Each of those points to a different product, and the same roof can host more than one.

Neath Port Talbot Council is the body that answers planning questions for a Coedhirwaun house. The Gower AONB lies elsewhere and has no bearing on an application from Coedhirwaun. For a typical house the next step is our Welsh guide to planning for skylights, which sets out when a rooflight is permitted development and when it calls for an application.

Four situations change the answer, and each is worth a line. A flat or a maisonette carries no householder permitted development rights. A council can strip those rights from houses by making an Article 4 direction. The planning conditions attached when a house was first built may have removed them as well. A listed building needs listed building consent for any work touching its character, and Cadw publishes the guidance on that.

When the position is unclear, the council's planning team will tell you what it thinks, and a Lawful Development Certificate turns that opinion into a document. It is worth the small delay if you expect to sell, because the paper answers a buyer's question before the question is asked.

Building control runs on its own track. The Welsh Government's roof-light page says that approval will generally be required for a new rooflight, and it gives the reasons: forming the opening usually involves altering the roof's frame, the roof must bear the unit's weight, and the unit itself must meet the energy rules. You choose between the council's building control team and a registered building control approver. Where the job needs a notification, we send it.

Replacement is simpler to describe. A like-for-like roof window swap is still building work; a repair is not. Under Approved Document L (Wales) a new roof window in an existing home should reach 1.4 W/m²K or Window Energy Rating Band B, and a new rooflight should reach 2.2 W/m²K.

The morning after a storm, the flat roof over a kitchen extension tells you what it has been doing. A clean glass rooflight with a dry kerb means the water left. A tidemark on the glass and a skin of grit in one corner means it did not. That is the reading to take when you weigh a flat roof rooflight against a roof lantern for the same hole in the ceiling.

A flat rooflight sits on a kerb and has a Welsh energy limit of 2.2 W/m²K. Approved Document L counts a rooflight as a glazed unit installed out of plane with the roof, on a kerb or upstand. VELUX offers double or triple glazing on its glass rooflights for energy efficiency and sound reduction. Pitch, fall and the outlet for the water matter as much as the glass.

A lantern stands on a builder's upstand. Brett Martin's installation bulletin asks for an upstand no lower than 150 mm and says level is best. Up to 5° of pitch is tolerated, though the bulletin warns that the result will probably look lopsided. A lantern is also tall enough that a planning application is the normal route over an existing flat roof, and a lantern planned for an extension that is still to be built goes to the council as a question at survey.

The room itself needs thought too, because the roof is only half the picture. A kitchen with a rooflight overhead gets light on the worktop and the table, and steam gathers at the glass. An opening unit lets that steam out, and electric operation can include a rain sensor, so the window closes by itself if a shower arrives while you are out. Our pages on electric opening rooflights cover the choices.

In the rest of the house, a landing with no window can borrow light through a sun tunnel, and a loft bedroom can take a roof window. A rooflight that has clouded inside its glass can be handled as a replacement of the sealed unit, or of the whole rooflight: see misted rooflights.

Any of these starts with the same three steps. Ring 01792 929062 for the free survey, then expect a fixed written quote, and finally a 10-year workmanship guarantee in writing once the job is complete. Or book the survey online.