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 Stock
Weatherboard village, windmill, conservation area. What that means for getting glass into a roof here is the whole of this page.
We travel to Stock
10-year guarantee
StockTown covered
Mid EssexWithin
30Mile radius by road
10Year workmanship guarantee
In Stock
What we install on Stock 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
14 things worth knowing about Stock roofs
Stock sits on a plateau of London clay and gravel between Chelmsford and Billericay, and it is one of the few Essex villages where the roofscape is the listed view. The tower mill on Mill Road, the shingled belfry spire on All Saints, and the run of white weatherboarded cottages along the Common are what the conservation area was drawn to protect, and all three are read from a distance, above the hedge line.
That gives rooflight work here a particular discipline. The unit has to do its job on a roof that is often steeply pitched, frequently pantiled and sometimes visible from a public open space. The rest of the village, the later detached houses in wooded plots on the approach roads, brings a completely different set of structural questions. This page covers both.
- 01 Weatherboard, and the structure behind it
- 02 Pantiles, and the profile a flashing has to follow
- 03 Which slope the Common can see
- 04 Shingles, dormers and the roofs that are not tiled
- 05 Attic trusses on the later detached houses
- 06 Deep plan houses and the rooms that never reach a window
- 07 Cart lodges, annexes and oak framed garden buildings
- 08 Central stacks on the older cottages
- 09 Overheating in a room that faces the afternoon
- 10 Bungalows on the village edge and their shallow pitches
- 11 Conservation pattern units, and what makes them read correctly
- 12 Insulation upgrades that arrive with the opening
- 13 Working over a village road with no footway
- 14 Getting a price for a Stock address
Weatherboard, and the structure behind it
The white boarded elevations along Common Road and the High Street are a cladding, not a wall. Behind feather edge or shiplap boarding there is almost always a timber frame with studwork, and behind the frame there may be brick nogging or nothing at all. This matters at roof level for one reason: the wall plate that the rafters bear on is a timber member sitting on a frame that has moved.
Where a rooflight opening reaches down towards the eaves, the trimming has to bear back into sound rafters rather than relying on anything near the plate. It also matters at the verge, since a boarded gable end has a barge board and a soaker detail that a unit set too close to the edge will run out of room to weather into.
Pantiles, and the profile a flashing has to follow
Clay pantiles, plain and glazed black, are common across the older Stock roofs and they are the most demanding covering in the county for a rooflight. A pantile has a deep S profile with a roll on one side and a pan on the other, a single lap rather than a double one, and a side interlock that has to remain continuous for the roof to work.
The flashing kit is specific. A plain tile or slate kit laid across pantiles bridges the pans and leaves an open channel straight under the apron. The correct kit has a deep corrugated skirt that presses into the pan and soakers cut to the tile gauge. Glazed pantiles add a second problem: they are close to impossible to match once broken, so they come off gently and go back in order.
A pantile roof punishes the wrong flashing kit faster than any other covering in Essex.
Which slope the Common can see
Conservation area policy asks whether a proposal preserves or enhances character, and in a village whose character is a set of long views across open ground, that question becomes practical rather than abstract. A rear slope screened by a garden and a hedge is a different proposition from a front slope facing the Common with nothing between it and the road.
The working approach is to walk the public vantage points before drawing anything: from the Common, from the churchyard, from the lane approaching the mill. If the plane in question does not appear in any of them, the design freedom is wide. If it does, the unit needs to sit flush, keep a slim dark frame and stay well below the ridge line. That is a design constraint, not a refusal, and it is usually satisfied on the first attempt.
Shingles, dormers and the roofs that are not tiled
Cedar and oak shingles appear on the belfry spire, on a number of dormer cheeks around the village, and on later garden buildings that were designed to sit alongside the vernacular. Shingles are a small unit covering laid to a steep pitch with a triple lap, and they behave more like slate than tile.
Glazing into shingles is done with a low profile kit dressed tight, and the fixing is into battens rather than a solid deck, so the courses above the opening come off and are re-laid. Shingle roofs also weather to silver grey at different rates depending on aspect, which means a small area of new material near a rooflight will stand out for two or three years before it settles. Where that is unacceptable, the honest answer is to place the unit on a plane with a full replacement due.
Attic trusses on the later detached houses
The larger houses on Mill Road, Ingatestone Road and the closes off them are mostly late twentieth century, and a good number were built with attic trusses rather than the standard Fink pattern found on estate housing such as Chelmer Village. An attic truss is a different component with a different constraint.
It has a clear span floor zone in the middle, so the room in the roof already exists, but it carries a vertical member and a sloping web at each side of that room. Those members define exactly where a roof window can sit, and the clear zone between them is usually wider than the six hundred millimetres a Fink truss allows. The floor structure is designed, so the room is usable. The slope is not free, so the unit is set out from the truss drawing where one survives, or from a measured survey where it does not.
Deep plan houses and the rooms that never reach a window
A common Stock house type is broad and deep, with a double garage on one side, a hall running through the middle and rooms that sit two rooms away from any external wall. Landings, inner halls, dressing rooms and utility spaces in these houses get no daylight at all.
A sun tunnel is designed for exactly this geometry. A collector on the roof feeds a rigid highly reflective tube down through the void to a diffuser in the ceiling below, and a short straight run delivers far more light than a long flexible one. On a two storey deep plan house the run from a rear slope down into a first floor landing is typically under two metres, which is close to the best case the product has.
Cart lodges, annexes and oak framed garden buildings
Oak framed cart lodges and garden rooms have become a standard addition on the larger plots here, and they are good candidates for roof glazing because they almost always have one open side and three solid ones. The daylight distribution in such a building is heavily weighted to the front, and a unit set in the rear plane balances it.
Structurally these are green oak frames with rafters at wide centres and a boarded or insulated deck over. Green oak shrinks and twists for several years after it is raised, so a rigid frame set into it wants a tolerance gap and a flexible perimeter seal rather than a tight fit. Fitting after the first summer, rather than during the build, gives the frame time to do most of its moving.
Central stacks on the older cottages
The seventeenth and eighteenth century cottages in the village core are frequently built around a large central brick stack, which is exactly where the roof is most complicated and where the light is most wanted, since the stack sits between the two rooms that need it.
Proximity to a stack brings a back gutter, soakers, a lead apron and often a secret gutter behind, all of them concentrating water in a narrow line. A rooflight set into that zone puts its own flashing into the wettest part of the roof. The general rule and its exceptions are covered on rooflights near a chimney; the short version for a Stock cottage is to keep three hundred millimetres of undisturbed covering between the outside of the unit flashing and the outside of the stack flashing, and to work down the slope from the stack rather than beside it.
Overheating in a room that faces the afternoon
The plateau gives these houses long open aspects to the west across farmland, which is pleasant in April and hard work in July. Late sun arrives at a low angle, so it passes through glazing rather than glancing off it, and it comes at the end of the day when the building has already absorbed heat.
Solar control glass with a low g-value handles most of it. Where the room is small relative to the area of glass, an external blind or awning specified with the unit does what an internal fabric blind cannot, because it stops the energy on the outside of the glass instead of trapping it behind. The full comparison of glazing options sits on energy efficient rooflights.
Bungalows on the village edge and their shallow pitches
The bungalows and chalet bungalows on the outer roads have wide, low roofs, often at twenty two to twenty five degrees, with concrete interlocking tiles and a trussed structure. The low pitch is the thing to check first, because it is close to the limit of what several roof window ranges will accept.
Most units want fifteen degrees as an absolute floor and a number are rated from twenty, with an underlay apron detail specified below twenty five. That is workable. What is not workable is dropping a unit rated from twenty five into a twenty two degree slope and hoping, because the flashing lap geometry simply does not deliver the cover it was designed for. The pitch is measured at survey with a level rather than taken from a plan.
Conservation pattern units, and what makes them read correctly
A conservation rooflight is not a marketing name. It is a specific pattern: a slim frame that sits flush with the surrounding covering rather than proud of it, a dark finish rather than white, and a central vertical glazing bar dividing the glass into two panes of a proportion that matches a historic cast iron light.
Three details decide whether it convinces. The unit must sit down into the covering so its top surface is close to the plane of the tiles. The frame must be narrow, since a wide surround reads as modern from twenty metres regardless of colour. And the proportion should be taller than it is wide. Getting those right is what allows a modern insulated unit to sit on a village roof without announcing itself, and the full detail is on the conservation rooflight page.
Insulation upgrades that arrive with the opening
Once a slope is open, the build-up below is visible and the cost of improving it is a fraction of what it would be as a standalone exercise. On the older cottages that build-up is frequently nothing at all: covering, underlay if any, rafters, and a ceiling.
The choice is between insulating between and under the rafters with a ventilated cavity kept clear above, or taking the construction to a warm roof with insulation continuous over the rafters at the next re-covering. The first is achievable during a rooflight installation. The second is a re-covering decision. Either way, the detail at the perimeter of the new unit is designed for the build-up that will exist afterwards rather than the one there today, since going back to it later means opening the roof twice.
Working over a village road with no footway
Several of the older properties front directly onto the High Street or Common Road with no pavement and no front garden. Reaching a front slope on those means standing scaffold in the carriageway, which needs a licence from the highway authority, lighting, and often a temporary traffic arrangement.
None of that is unusual and all of it takes lead time. Where the work can be done from the rear instead, it is, and where it cannot, the licence application runs in parallel with the order rather than after it. On the larger plots away from the core the picture reverses: space is plentiful, but soft ground and mature trees decide where a tower or a lorry mounted platform can safely stand.
Getting a price for a Stock address
The sequence is a range by email, then a fixed written figure after a survey. The range needs the room, the roof plane, the covering and roughly what you want. The survey settles the pitch, the structure, the flashing kit, the access and, in the conservation area, the visibility of the plane from public ground.
Sunspire works into the village from Chelmsford and covers the neighbouring parishes on the same terms, including Galleywood to the north and Billericay to the south, with the full list on the areas we cover page. The Building Control notification is part of the job, the roof is closed and watertight at the end of every working day, and the workmanship carries a ten year guarantee.
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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.
- Surveyed before it is priced
- 10-year workmanship guarantee
- Building Control notification handled
- New installations and replacements