Rooflight Questions Answered

These are the questions people actually ask, taken one at a time. Most were asked on a doorstep or over email before a survey, several of them week after week, and each one gets the real answer rather than a redirection to a contact form.

How each of these is written

The answer comes first, in the opening line, including where the honest answer is that it depends on something specific. Then the reasoning, then the numbers that matter: pitches in degrees, upstand heights in millimetres, falls as a ratio, the covering by name. If a question has a different answer on a flat roof than on a pitched slope, both are given rather than one being quietly assumed.

They are grouped the same way as the guides, so a question about glass build-ups sits with specification and a question about winter misting sits with living with it. The grouping is there for browsing. If you already know your question, the chips at the top of this page are faster than scrolling.

When a short answer settles it, and when it does not

A good many of these questions genuinely have a short answer. Whether a particular unit can go on a shallow pitch, who notifies Building Control, whether a misted unit can be reglazed on its own, what happens to a powered opener in a power cut. Those close in a couple of hundred words and there is nothing more to add.

Others open onto a whole subject. Sizing, glazing specification and anything structural have too many variables to settle in isolation, so those answers give the working rule and then link into the guide that carries the full reasoning. Following that link is usually worth the extra ten minutes.

The questions a roof has to answer in person

Some things cannot be settled from a page, and it is fairer to say so than to guess. Whether your rafters are a cut roof or trusses, whether the flat roof has a real fall or has quietly lost it, whether the ceiling line lands where the drawing says, and whether the timber around an existing opening is still sound. Those come out of a survey, which is also the point at which a range becomes a fixed written figure. How we price and quote explains that sequence in full.