Skylights and rooflights in Ferryside

Ferryside is a village, and the 2011 census counted 846 residents. Its Welsh name is Glan y Fferi. It began as a landing-place on the ferry route to Llansteffan, a crossing that Giraldus Cambrensis used in 1188, and it developed as a fishing village. In 1844 the parish population stood at 895.

Much of the village grew after 1852, when Isambard Kingdom Brunel's South Wales Railway linked it to Carmarthen and Swansea. Today the station offers regular connections to London Paddington, Pembroke Dock, Milford Haven, Carmarthen, Swansea and Cardiff, and in 2017 it received a government grant to buy new equipment.

Water still shapes daily life. The ferry across the Tywi to Llansteffan ended in the 1950s, and a new service began in 2018, run by Carmarthen Bay Ferries with a customised Sealegs amphibious craft. It offers crossings of five to ten minutes to Llansteffan, plus estuary trips of 45 minutes and sunset trips of an hour, helped by a £300,000 grant from the Coastal Communities Fund. The River Towy Yacht Club is based in the village, and the parish church, St Ishmael's, stands on a rock near the shore.

Swansea sits at the start of our distances, and Ferryside lies about 23 road miles from it, in the north-west, well inside the 30 we cover. Among the closest places on our list are Kidwelly and Trimsaran.

Housing is the gap in our sources. They tell us the village grew with the railway, and nothing about how its houses were built, so the table beside the radar lists house types in general. A survey of your own roof turns that into advice for one house.

It is worth separating the roofs that came with the railway's growth from later additions, because each calls for a different approach. An older pitched roof may take a single roof window in the rear slope. A later extension will probably have a flat roof, where the fall and the kerb matter most. Which of those you have depends on your house, not on the village.

Planning applications for Ferryside go to Carmarthenshire County Council. Our guide to skylight planning permission in Wales explains whether a given rooflight needs one, and Ferryside is outside the Gower AONB, so that designation adds nothing.

The council also runs building control, and Wales lets you pick a registered building control approver instead. Both apply the same regulations, but they are separate from planning and neither overrules it. Any window, roof window or rooflight is building work to fit. For a brand new rooflight the usual outcome is that approval is needed, since the roof has to be opened up and then has to carry the glass. If the work is notifiable, we send the notification to the body you chose.

For energy, the guidance is Approved Document L (Wales). A new or replacement roof window should reach 1.4 W/m²K, or Window Energy Rating Band B, and a rooflight on a kerb or upstand 2.2 W/m²K. A rooflight's figure takes in the whole of the unit's developed surface, which is often larger than the hole in the roof. If the kerb arrives with the rooflight as one assembly, the same 2.2 limit takes in the kerb.

Some houses start from a different position. Flats and maisonettes carry no householder permitted development rights, and a council may take those rights away from houses with an Article 4 direction. A listed building needs consent from the local planning authority, with Cadw consulted. Starting before consent arrives can lead to prosecution.

Part of the same regulations deals with air. A home should be no worse ventilated after a window is replaced than before it, and the guidance suggests that vents in the new frame should be no smaller than any in the old one. An opening roof window can also serve as purge ventilation, though only if it opens far enough in relation to the size of the room.

If you want a formal view of your own house, ask the council what it thinks. A Lawful Development Certificate puts the view in writing.

The roof windows page explains how a roof window can serve as an escape route from an upper room.

Extensions to older houses so often have flat roofs that the question of falls comes up early. Glass laid over a flat roof sheds rain only as well as the roof beneath allows. A kerb-mounted flat rooflight with a proper slope behind it sends water away, while one sitting in a hollow holds it. A roof lantern hands the water down its glazed pitches instead.

Which of the two suits depends on the room. Brett Martin recommends building a lantern's upstand level, adding that up to 5 degrees of pitch is possible but will probably look lopsided. If a lantern is proposed for a new extension, we ask the council how the rules apply before going further.

The glass is a second choice. On the VELUX flat and curved glass rooflights, buyers can choose double or triple glazing, which the maker pitches at energy efficiency and sound reduction. For the choices in full, see energy-efficient rooflights.

Pitched roofs take roof windows. On a shallow slope VELUX makes a low-pitch window for 10 to 20 degrees. A stairwell or hall without an outside wall can take a sun tunnel instead.

Out of reach is where an opener earns its keep. The electric and solar roof windows from VELUX have a rain sensor built in, so the sash shuts without being asked, a help when the weather turns and nobody is home to notice. The electric opening rooflights page has the detail.

A unit with fog between its panes has lost its seal, and misted rooflights can be replaced like for like, with the new unit expected to meet the Welsh limit.

Ring 01792 929062 or use the form to arrange a survey. It comes before any price, the quote is fixed and written, and once the job is done you hold a 10-year workmanship guarantee, also in writing.