Skylights and rooflights in Bingham

This is a market town and civil parish in the Rushcliffe borough of Nottinghamshire, with Nottingham eleven miles to the west. It is twinned with Wallenfels in Bavaria, and it holds an open-air food market in the Market Place every Thursday, with a farmers' market on the third Saturday of the month. The roofs around that square belong to the oldest part of the story, but most of the houses in town were built much later.

The first big surge came with the Industrial Revolution, when a growing workforce needed housing. The railway arrived in 1851, which added to the pressure, but the farming economy was slipping, and the lace and stocking knitting that people did at home lost out to factories in Nottingham. Poverty and unemployment followed, and the town did not properly recover until after the Second World War. Then came another surge: the 1960s and 1970s saw almost constant development, with new houses going up to accommodate the local population.

That history gives three kinds of roof, and each wants something different from a skylight. The older houses near the centre have steeper, shorter slopes and are often seen from the street. And the late twentieth-century estates have wide, shallow roofs on trussed rafters, a pattern that repeats across whole streets. Measure one of those lofts and you learn a lot about the next ten.

Trussed rafters deserve a plain explanation, since they decide so much. Each one is a triangle of slim timbers made in a factory, set close to its neighbours and braced to them, so the whole row carries the roof together. A roof window that is wider than the gap between two trusses means cutting one, and that is only done with a designed trimmer, a doubled-up timber that picks up the load. Where possible we choose a window that fits between the trusses and leave the structure alone.

On the estates the loft question comes up more than any other. Many owners have boarded part of the floor for storage and never thought of the space as a room. It can become one, but it needs headroom, a safe way up and a route for ventilation, and the roof window supplies the last of those along with the light. We tell you straight away if a loft is too shallow to be worth the effort, because the measuring tape settles that in a minute.

Newer houses also tend to have a good deal of insulation laid across the loft floor. A roof window does not need that disturbed, but the lining around the opening has to be insulated and sealed so the new window does not become a cold spot. We detail it when we measure, because it is easier to plan it in than to chase it afterwards.

Rushcliffe Borough Council decides planning questions for Bingham. Under the 2015 national order, an owner may usually put glazing into a roof slope without applying, if the work stays inside three limits. No part of the glass may stand more than 150mm off the slope. The roof's own peak is the height ceiling. And glazing on a side elevation is obscured and fixed, except for an opening section whose lowest edge is more than 1.7m up, taken from the floor underneath.

Bingham Conservation Area, says the register, covers the town centre, with a designation date of 5 November 2002. Inside it are 24 listed buildings: one is Grade I and the rest are Grade II. Standing inside the area leaves the permitted right with an unlisted house. Only an Article 4 direction removes it, and whether yours has one is for the council to say. Listing changes the picture completely, since consent for a new roof opening must come first.

For flats and maisonettes the householder rights simply do not apply, and a planning application opens the job. The legislation behind all this is set out in the full planning guide; this page keeps to a short version.

Energy and safety rules are a separate track. New glazing in an existing house is held to a thermal limit. For a roof window the figure is 1.4 W/m²K, or as a separate route Window Energy Rating band B; a rooflight is held to 2.2 W/m²K. These limits cover new and replacement fittings alike. We check the rating on the unit before it is ordered, so the paperwork matches the product. Building Control sits alongside: where it applies, we file the notification ourselves with Rushcliffe or a registered approver, and the paperwork is complete when the glass is in.

A loft rule worth knowing: Approved Document B does not accept a roof window as the fire exit from a room above two storeys. A window counts only for a floor no higher than 4.5m above ground level, so a higher loft room is served by a protected stair, and the window is there for daylight and ventilation.

From Leicester the town lies north-north-east, 24.3 miles by road, which is about 32 minutes in the van. It stands near the junction of the old Roman road, the Fosse Way, which runs as the A46 between Leicester and Newark-on-Trent, and the A52 that links Nottingham to Grantham. A bypass on the south side of the town for the A52 opened in December 1986, which keeps through traffic away from the centre and makes a Bingham address easy to reach on a working morning.

There is a railway station about 300 metres from the town point on the map, so the line that arrived in 1851 is still part of the town's life. The town grew in several waves, and that mix of housing shows in the lofts: some converted long ago, some never touched, some with floor boards laid and nothing else.

Romans Quarter, a suburb marked 1.3 kilometres out, is one part of town we know by name, and the villages around town include Radcliffe-on-Trent, East Bridgford, Car Colston, Scarrington, Aslockton, Whatton-in-the-Vale, Tithby and Cropwell Butler. Many of those make similar enquiries to the town itself: a loft room that never got its window, a kitchen extension that is dark in the middle, a landing with no daylight at all.

Extensions built in the last few decades are the other regular candidate. A single-storey kitchen at the back with a flat roof usually has one thing wrong with it: the daylight stops a metre from the patio doors. Put a flat roof rooflight over the worktop or the table, standing on a kerb, and the light reaches the room's centre. The kerb is the raised frame under the glass; its height settles whether rain runs off or lingers.

Timing is a common question. One visit covers the lot: we climb to the slope, crawl through the loft and stand in the room that will get the light so that the drawing and the quote reflect what is really there. The quote then states what is being fitted, where it goes and how the opening is formed. Installation is a separate day, planned around the weather, since an open roof is best left open for as short a time as the work allows.

Whichever layer of the town the house belongs to, the visit is the same: the roof, the loft and the room below, looked at together. Then a fixed written quote names the unit, the size and the position, and nothing is cut until you have agreed to it.