Roof Lantern Installation
Flat-roof glazing sized to the room and detailed into the kerb below it.
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Mid Essex
Rooflight installation in Hatfield Peverel
Linear village, railway commuter stock. What that means for getting glass into a roof here is the whole of this page.
We travel to Hatfield Peverel
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Hatfield PeverelTown covered
Mid EssexWithin
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In Hatfield Peverel
What we install on Hatfield Peverel roofs
Flat Roof Rooflight Installation
Flush and kerb-mounted units into single-ply, felt and GRP flat roofs.
View this service →Roof Window Installation
Roof windows trimmed into slate, clay and concrete tile without proud flashing.
View this service →VELUX Window Installation
We install VELUX alongside Fakro, Keylite and Roto roof windows.
View this service →Electric and Opening Rooflights
Actuated opening units, rain sensors and controls, wired and commissioned.
View this service →Energy Efficient Rooflights
Specified on U-value and g-value, not on the brochure photograph.
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The local detail
15 things worth knowing about Hatfield Peverel roofs
Hatfield Peverel is a linear village. It runs along one street between Chelmsford and Witham, with the railway on one side and the old church and priory site at one end, and almost everything else strung off that spine on long narrow plots. The station is the reason the village grew the way it did, and it is still the reason most of the roof work here happens.
A commuter village generates a particular kind of enquiry. Somebody needs a room that the house does not currently have, the ground floor is already spoken for, and the loft is the only unbuilt volume left. That makes the roof slope the working surface, and it makes head height, escape provision and light quality the three things worth getting right before anything is ordered.
- 01 A village strung along one street, and what that does to roofs
- 02 Loft conversions for the commute
- 03 Roof windows as escape windows in a converted loft
- 04 Head height, and the collar that limits it
- 05 Purlins, binders and the older Hatfield Peverel roofs
- 06 Post-war and later stock off The Street
- 07 Long narrow plots and rear extension roofs
- 08 Conservation area constraints near the church
- 09 Working on the railway side of the village
- 10 Glazing for a room that is used at night
- 11 Blackout blinds, and ordering them with the unit
- 12 Home office glare, and the screen problem
- 13 Building Regulations on a Hatfield Peverel loft
- 14 Access and scaffold on a village street frontage
- 15 From photograph to fixed figure
A village strung along one street, and what that does to roofs
The linear layout has a practical consequence. Most houses present a front roof slope to The Street and a rear slope to a long garden, and those two planes are treated completely differently by planning, by the neighbours and by the sun.
The rear slope is where the majority of glass goes. It faces away from the public view, it usually has the better orientation for a room that gets used in the evening, and it is reachable from a garden rather than from a pavement. The front slope is possible and it is a different conversation, involving both the planning position and the visual discipline of a slim flush unit.
Loft conversions for the commute
The typical brief here is a loft turned into a bedroom with an en suite, or into a home office that is genuinely usable for eight hours a day. Both need daylight, and in a loft the only source of daylight is the roof.
Two roof windows spaced along a slope give a far better result than one large one in the middle, because two pools of light overlap and fill the room while one leaves the ends dark. The rule of thumb for glazing area is fifteen to twenty per cent of the floor area below, and in a loft with sloping ceilings the upper end of that range is usually the right call.
Roof windows as escape windows in a converted loft
Where a loft becomes a habitable room, Building Regulations require a means of escape, and in most single storey conversions that duty falls on a roof window. The requirements are dimensional and specific rather than a matter of opinion.
The unit needs an unobstructed openable area of at least 0.33 square metres, with a minimum clear height and width of 450 millimetres each, and the bottom of the openable area must sit no more than 1100 millimetres above the floor. That last figure is the one that catches people out, because it fixes the vertical position of the window in the slope before any aesthetic preference is expressed. A top hung or centre pivot unit that can be rotated and held clear is what makes the clear opening achievable.
On an escape window the sill height above the floor is a regulation, not a preference.
Head height, and the collar that limits it
The constraint that kills more loft schemes than any other is head height, and it is decided by the existing roof rather than by ambition. What matters is the clear distance from the finished floor to the underside of the ridge or the collar, after the new floor structure and the insulated ceiling lining have taken their share.
A traditional cut roof with purlins and collars gives a usable band down the middle of the plan and low sloping edges either side. The useful trick is that the low edges are exactly where a roof window earns its keep: the window sits in the slope where nobody can stand upright anyway, so it turns dead floor area into a place to sit and look out.
Purlins, binders and the older Hatfield Peverel roofs
The older stock along the village, the Victorian and Edwardian houses and the interwar semis, generally has a traditional cut roof. Rafters at four hundred or six hundred centres, purlins running horizontally to support them mid-span, and ceiling joists tied across.
That structure is straightforward to work with. Trimming an opening means doubling the rafters either side, fitting trimmers above and below, and transferring the load into those doubled members. The purlin position is the thing to establish early, because an opening that crosses a purlin needs the purlin trimming and supporting rather than simply cutting, and that changes the detail and the day.
Post-war and later stock off The Street
Behind the main street there is post-war and later estate housing, and from the nineteen sixties onwards that means trussed rafters. The webs and the bottom chord of a truss carry load and are joined with pressed plates, so a truss is not cut in the way a rafter is trimmed.
Roof windows in a trussed roof are sized to sit between the trusses, which usually limits the clear width to around five hundred and fifty millimetres at typical spacing. Two narrow units side by side, flashed as a pair, is the standard answer where a wide one was wanted. A wider single opening needs an engineered trimming solution, which is entirely achievable and adds a calculation to the programme.
Long narrow plots and rear extension roofs
The plots run a long way back, which makes single storey rear extensions easy to get consented and easy to build. The problem they create is depth. A room that extends four or five metres from the original rear wall has a far corner that no vertical window will ever reach.
That is the classic case for a flat rooflight. A rooflight in a flat roof faces the whole dome of the sky rather than the half a vertical window sees, and it is not shaded by the fence, the neighbouring house or the tree at the end of the garden. The working figure used in daylight design is that it delivers something in the order of two to three times the illuminance of a vertical window of equal area.
Conservation area constraints near the church
There is a conservation area covering the historic end of the village around the church and the older buildings near it. Inside it, permitted development rights for rooflights can be withdrawn by an Article 4 direction, and the appearance of any unit visible from the street is assessed rather than assumed.
The unit that satisfies that test is a slim cast frame in a dark finish, with a central vertical glazing bar and a profile that sits within the plane of the tiles. Where the roof is not publicly visible the ordinary product range is generally acceptable. Establishing which of those two situations applies is a five minute job at the start, and an expensive discovery at the end.
Working on the railway side of the village
The main line runs through the village and the houses closest to it have a specific glazing consideration. Sound reaching a roof plane is not attenuated by fences, hedges or neighbouring buildings the way sound reaching a ground floor window is, and a loft bedroom is the room most affected.
The answer is in the sealed unit. Two panes of different thickness stop the unit resonating at a single frequency, and a laminated outer pane damps vibration through its interlayer. Both are ordered with the unit rather than added later, and both also happen to reduce the sound of rain on glass.
Glazing for a room that is used at night
A loft bedroom is used when it is dark outside and warm inside, which reverses most of the usual glazing logic. Surface condensation forms on the room side of the glass when warm moist air meets a cold surface, and the coldest surface in a loft bedroom at four in the morning is the rooflight.
Two things reduce it. A better glazing specification, because a warmer inner pane condenses less, and background ventilation so the moisture generated by two sleeping people has somewhere to go. Condensation appearing between the panes rather than on the room face is a different matter entirely: that is a sealed unit that has reached the end of its life and wants replacing.
Blackout blinds, and ordering them with the unit
Blinds for roof windows run in side channels within the frame, because gravity is not on their side. A blind hanging on a sloped surface simply sags away from the glass and lets light past the edges, which defeats the purpose.
Those channels are part of the unit. Retrofitting a properly integrated blackout blind to a window that was not ordered with the provision usually means an external cassette or a compromise, so the moment to decide is at order. In a loft bedroom on an east facing slope, June makes the argument for blackout at about half past four in the morning without any help from a salesperson.
Home office glare, and the screen problem
A loft office has a specific failure mode that a bedroom does not. Direct sun falling on a screen, or a bright rooflight sitting directly in the field of view behind a monitor, makes a room unusable for work even though it is beautifully lit by any other measure.
The design answer is placement rather than product. A rooflight on a north facing slope gives even, shadowless light with no direct sun on the desk. Where the only available slope faces south or west, solar control glass with a lower g-value plus an integrated blind is the working combination, and the desk goes where the light arrives from the side rather than from in front or behind.
Building Regulations on a Hatfield Peverel loft
A loft conversion is notifiable in its own right, and the rooflights inside it are assessed as part of that. Part L governs the thermal performance of the units, Part K covers guarding and the risk of falling, Part B covers escape and fire separation of the new stair, and Part F covers ventilation of the new habitable room.
Where Sunspire is fitting rooflights into an existing roof outside a full conversion, the notification for that work is handled as part of the job. Where the rooflights are one element of a larger conversion being run by a builder, the units are specified to satisfy the relevant parts and the evidence is provided for the overall submission.
Access and scaffold on a village street frontage
Access decides more of the price than people expect. A rear slope reached across a garden with room for a scaffold is straightforward. A front slope on The Street, with a narrow pavement, a bus route and parked cars, is a different exercise involving a licence and a scaffold designed to keep the footway usable.
The survey establishes where material comes in, where the stripped covering goes while the roof is open, and whether the scaffold can stand on the ground available. Those answers are in the fixed figure rather than raised on the first morning.
From photograph to fixed figure
Sunspire works to two numbers. A range by email once the room, the roof and the rough size are known, then a fixed written price after a survey, with the Building Control notification included in the job. The roof is never left open overnight.
The quickest way to start is a photograph of the roof slope from the garden, one of the ceiling or the loft interior, and an approximate room size. Sunspire travels to Hatfield Peverel from Chelmsford and works across the villages between here and Witham on the same basis, which is set out on the areas we cover page.
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We start with the building, the covering and the slope. Then we tell you what will suit it, and what it will cost, as a fixed written number.
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