SKYLIGHTS START WITH THE ROOF: PLANNING DAYLIGHT FROM ABOVE
Daylight that arrives through the roof plane is different from daylight that arrives through a window. It is more even, it reaches deeper into the floor plate, and it does not care which way the building faces. That is why roof glazing keeps showing up in the projects we admire most. At the Parrish Art Museum, ClearShade™ honeycomb skylights helped cut lighting energy use by 89% while protecting light-sensitive artwork.
THE ROOF DOES THE HARD WORK
Every skylight is, structurally speaking, a hole cut in a weather barrier. The glazing gets the photographs, but the roof around it does the hard work: carrying snow load around the opening, moving water past the curb, and keeping wind-driven rain out of the flashing laps. When a skylight leaks, the glazing unit itself is rarely the culprit. In our experience the failure point is almost always the interface, where curb, flashing and roofing membrane meet.
TWO TRADES, ONE ASSEMBLY
That interface belongs to two different trades. The glazier owns the unit; the roofer owns everything it sits on. The projects that perform for decades are the ones where those trades were coordinated from the first detail drawing, with one party clearly responsible for the water path.
- Sequence: curbs and blocking go in with the roof, not after it.
- Flashing: step and counter flashing should be part of the roofing scope, lapped into the field membrane.
- Warranty: agree in writing on who covers the joint between systems.
A NOTE AT HOUSE SCALE
The same logic applies to a residence. The best moment to add or replace a skylight is during a reroof, when curbs and flashing can be integrated into fresh underlayment instead of patched into an aging one. In hail country this matters even more. Along Colorado’s Front Range, a local contractor such as Castle Pines Roofing Co will fold curb and flashing work into a roof replacement, which keeps a single crew responsible for the entire weather barrier rather than splitting it between trades a year apart.
However the light gets in, the principle holds: plan the roof first, then the opening. Details and performance data for ClearShade™ roof glazing are on our ClearShade IGU product page.
Blog feed