Roof Lantern Installation
Flat-roof glazing sized to the room and detailed into the kerb below it.
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West Essex
Rooflight installation in Loughton
Forest suburb, large Edwardian stock. What that means for getting glass into a roof here is the whole of this page.
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In Loughton
What we install on Loughton 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
16 things worth knowing about Loughton roofs
Loughton has a daylight problem that most Essex towns do not, and the cause is standing outside the window. The town runs up against Epping Forest along its whole western edge, the streets that climb the hills are lined with mature trees, and a great many of the large houses were deliberately built among them. Vertical windows on those plots look into canopy for most of the year.
Which is why a rooflight does disproportionate work here. It faces the open sky rather than a hedge, a fence or a beech at the end of the garden, and on a shaded plot the difference between the two is not marginal. Sunspire covers Loughton from Chelmsford as part of its normal working radius.
- 01 Canopy shading, and why light from above wins in Loughton
- 02 Edwardian villa roofs, and the volume above the ceiling
- 03 Purlins, struts and the Loughton loft
- 04 Plain clay tile and Welsh slate on the same street
- 05 Complex roofscapes: valleys, hips and gables
- 06 Conservation areas on the Loughton hills
- 07 Front slopes, back slopes and what an officer looks at
- 08 Tile hanging, barge boards and the detail beside an opening
- 09 The Debden estate and its hipped concrete roofs
- 10 Rear scullery outshots at low pitch
- 11 Trees, TPOs and getting a scaffold up
- 12 Escape openings in a converted Loughton loft
- 13 Rain noise under a big Edwardian slope
- 14 Sizing glass to a deep Loughton room
- 15 What a Loughton survey records
- 16 Where a Loughton enquiry starts
Canopy shading, and why light from above wins in Loughton
A vertical window collects light from roughly half the sky, and on a treed plot a large share of that half is blocked. A rooflight in a roof plane sees the whole dome and is shaded only by whatever overhangs the roof itself.
The working figure used in daylight design is that a rooflight delivers something in the order of two to three times the illuminance of a vertical window of the same area, and the multiple rises as the obstruction outside the wall rises. On a Loughton plot with forty foot trees at the boundary the gap is at the top of that range. It is the reason a modest opening in a roof fixes a room that two large ground floor windows never did.
Edwardian villa roofs, and the volume above the ceiling
Loughton filled out after the railway arrived, and the housing that resulted is largely late Victorian and Edwardian: substantial detached and semi-detached villas on generous plots along the roads climbing away from the station.
Those roofs are steep, usually 40 to 45 degrees, which puts a great deal of usable volume above the top floor ceiling. Head height under the ridge is often well over two and a half metres. That is why so much of the rooflight work in the town is tied up with loft conversions and with lofts that are being lit rather than converted, and it is also why the structural conversation here is about purlins rather than trusses.
Purlins, struts and the Loughton loft
An Edwardian cut roof carries its rafters on purlins, and the purlins are supported at intervals by struts landing on internal load bearing walls or on binders. Everything in that arrangement is doing a job.
An opening trimmed between rafters is routine carpentry: double the rafters either side, put trimmers in above and below, and the load redistributes. An opening that wants to cross a purlin is a different proposition, because the purlin is carrying the whole slope above it. Sometimes the answer is to move the opening up or down the slope by a few hundred millimetres so it sits cleanly in one bay. Sometimes it is a designed solution with a new beam. The point is that it is settled in the loft with a tape before a unit is ordered.
On an Edwardian roof the purlin position, not the room layout, usually decides where the glass goes.
Plain clay tile and Welsh slate on the same street
Loughton streets frequently mix coverings, because the houses went up over thirty years and fashions changed. Plain clay tile on one villa, Welsh slate on its neighbour, a later concrete tile on a house that was recovered in the 1970s.
The flashing kit is chosen by what is actually on the roof and nothing else. Plain clay tile takes a kit with soakers dressed between the courses. Natural slate is thin and flat and takes a low profile kit dressed tight, and slates are held by nails rather than nibs, so they are ripped and refixed with tingles rather than lifted and dropped back. Concrete interlocking tile has a deep profile and needs a kit made for that depth. Using the nearest kit to hand instead of the right one is how a roof window develops a proud apron and a slow leak in its third winter.
Complex roofscapes: valleys, hips and gables
The Edwardian villa roof is rarely a simple pair of slopes. There are cross gables, half hips, projecting bays with their own small roofs, and valleys running down between the elements.
A valley is the wettest line on a roof, because two planes are discharging into it, and the working rule is to keep an opening well clear of one. Practically that means at least a tile course or two of clear covering between the side of the unit and the valley line, so the flashing has somewhere to terminate and the water running down the valley is never crossing a lap. Where a room only has valley to work with, moving the opening onto an adjacent plane usually costs less than engineering the awkward detail.
Conservation areas on the Loughton hills
Loughton carries several conservation areas rather than one, covering the older and more architecturally coherent parts of the hills and the streets nearest the forest. Boundaries follow individual roads, and adjacent houses can fall on opposite sides.
Inside a boundary, permitted development rights for rooflights are commonly withdrawn by an Article 4 direction. The unit that needs no application at all on an estate half a mile away needs a full one here. This is checkable in a minute on the district council’s designation map and it is worth checking first, because it decides both the programme and the type of unit that will be accepted.
Front slopes, back slopes and what an officer looks at
Where consent is required, the deciding question is almost always visibility from public ground rather than the roof itself. A rear slope facing a long private garden and a front slope facing a road are assessed quite differently.
On a front or otherwise visible plane the design that gets consent is a conservation rooflight: a slim cast metal frame with a central vertical glazing bar, sitting flush in the plane of the covering with a projection of about 20mm or less. Proportion counts as much as the frame. A tall narrow unit reads as historically plausible; a wide landscape opening does not, whatever it is made of. On the rear, standard roof windows are usually acceptable, which is worth knowing because the cost difference is real.
Tile hanging, barge boards and the detail beside an opening
Loughton’s Edwardian architecture is full of applied detail: tile hung upper storeys, deep bracketed eaves, decorative barge boards on the gables, and half timbering in the apex.
None of it is structural, but all of it constrains where an opening can sit and how it is weathered. A roof window landing close to a gable needs enough covering between it and the barge board for the side flashing to be dressed and terminated properly. Tile hanging on the wall below an abutment wants its own separate detail rather than being asked to do double duty. The general principle is that the flashing needs clear covering all round it, and the ornament decides how much clear covering there is.
The Debden estate and its hipped concrete roofs
The eastern side of Loughton is dominated by the Debden estate, a large out-county housing development laid out from the late 1940s and built at scale. The roofs are consistent: hipped, around 35 degrees, in concrete interlocking tile on traditional cut roofs or early trussed construction depending on phase.
These are straightforward jobs and quick ones. A hip does reduce the usable slope area compared with a gable, because the plane narrows towards the top, so the opening position is set by where the trimmed bay is wide enough rather than by where the room would prefer it. Right to buy properties on the estate are freehold and behave normally. Where a property is still tenanted or is a flat, the landlord’s consent runs alongside everything else.
Rear scullery outshots at low pitch
Almost every Victorian and Edwardian house in the town has something at the back with a shallower roof than the main house: a scullery outshot, a two storey rear range with a lean-to, or a later single storey addition.
These are the darkest rooms and the most constrained roofs. A lean-to at 12 or 15 degrees sits at or below the minimum rating of most roof windows, so the choice is between a unit specifically rated for a low pitch with its underlay detail carried below the opening, or replacing the shallow slope locally with a small flat area and a flat rooflight on a proper kerb. The measured pitch, taken with a level rather than read off a plan, decides which.
Trees, TPOs and getting a scaffold up
Access in Loughton is generally good by the standards of an old town. Plots are wide, drives are long and there is somewhere to stand a lorry. The complication is overhead rather than underfoot.
Mature trees on and around the plots are frequently protected, either individually by a tree preservation order or collectively by conservation area status, and cutting a limb to get a scaffold or a crane past is not a decision to take on the day. Where the canopy is in the way, the answer is usually a scaffold designed around it and materials taken up by hand rather than any pruning at all. It gets looked at during the survey, along with whether the ground under a scaffold base is a drive or a lawn on soft ground.
Escape openings in a converted Loughton loft
Where a loft is being brought into use as habitable accommodation, Part B is engaged and one of the openings usually has to serve as a means of escape. That imposes dimensions rather than preferences.
The escape opening needs a clear openable area with a minimum height and width, and the bottom of that clear opening has to sit within a defined height above the floor. On a 45 degree Loughton slope that puts the unit lower down the roof than the daylight argument would want, because a window high in a steep slope has its sill well above head height. It is normal to resolve that with two units: one positioned for escape and one positioned for light, which is a better lit room than a single compromise anyway.
Rain noise under a big Edwardian slope
Rain on glass is louder than rain on tile, and a converted loft bedroom directly under a roof window notices it. The usual description is that it is pleasant for the first winter and less so by the third.
Two specification choices reduce it meaningfully and neither can be added afterwards. Laminated glass in the outer pane damps the drumming, because the interlayer absorbs vibration that a single sheet transmits. And an asymmetric unit, where the two panes differ in thickness, breaks the resonance rather than reinforcing it. Both are ordered with the unit. In a bedroom that also wants blackout, the blind provision has to be ordered at the same time, because rooflight blinds run in channels within the frame and retrofitting proper channels is not possible.
Sizing glass to a deep Loughton room
The starting rule of thumb is glazing area of around 15 to 20 per cent of the floor area of the room below. For a five by four metre loft room that is roughly three to four square metres.
The rule breaks in both directions and Loughton produces both cases. A deep room with one gable window is under-served at that ratio, because the far end is still dim and the light needs to be brought further in, which argues for spreading several openings along the slope rather than grouping them. A small south facing room at 20 per cent under an unshaded slope is over-glazed and will overheat, which is a glass specification question rather than an area one. Orientation therefore belongs in the conversation before size does.
| Slope faces | What it gives on a Loughton plot | Usual glazing call |
|---|---|---|
| North | Even shadowless light, no gain, often the least tree shaded | Neutral glass, generous area viable |
| East | Bright early, calm from midday | Neutral glass, blackout blind in a bedroom |
| South | Strong midday and afternoon gain where the canopy is clear | Solar control glass, area disciplined |
| West | Low hot late sun through gaps in the trees | Solar control, opening unit for the evening |
What a Loughton survey records
The survey establishes the covering and its condition, the pitch measured at more than one point, the rafter centres and section sizes taken in the loft, the purlin and strut positions, where the ceiling line will land relative to the proposed opening, the orientation, and the access route including anything overhead.
On a conservation area property it also collects what a consent application will want: photographs of the slope, a note of what is visible from the road, and the projection of the proposed frame above the covering. Gathering that once saves a second visit. It is also the point at which awkward truths surface, such as a bathroom extract discharging into the roof void or a ceiling that is not where the drawing put it.
Where a Loughton enquiry starts
Send a photograph of the roof slope from the garden, one of the ceiling from inside, a rough room size, and say whether the address falls inside one of the conservation areas. The council’s designation map answers that last question quickly if it is not already known.
From that a range comes back by email, followed by a fixed written figure once the roof has been surveyed. The costs page sets out what moves the figure between those two stages. Loughton appears alongside Epping and the rest of the forest fringe on the areas we cover page, and the guides section goes further into loft conversion glazing and escape requirements.
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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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