Serving Salt Lake City, UT & Nearby Areas
(385) 438-3591
Serving Salt Lake City, UT & Nearby Areas
(385) 438-3591
Not by default, and that is not an insult to roofers. Most will not touch a skylight at all. The ones who take it on without training are the reason skylights have the reputation they do. Ask what training they have and how many they have actually done, then judge the answer.
Ask how many skylights the company has installed and what manufacturer training anyone there has completed.
Skylight work is a separate specialty from roofing, so general roofing competence does not carry over.
Ask your roofer directly whether they install skylights or subcontract them.
Skylights do not have a bad reputation in Utah because skylights are bad. They have it because people who never learned to install them install a lot of them.
Mattie Tueller, Master Roofing
Because they know what they do not know. A common call to Master Roofing goes: I am getting a new roof, I have a skylight. My roofer will not touch it. That refusal is not incompetence, it is judgment. A company that declines work outside its competence is showing you something really good about how it operates.
A skylight is a hole cut through the weatherproof surface of a house, then made watertight again. That is a different discipline from laying shingles across an uninterrupted plane. Getting it wrong does not produce a small problem. It produces water inside the room the skylight was supposed to brighten.
So the roofer who says no is doing you a favor. The one worth worrying about is the one who says yes without hesitation and has never mentioned skylights before you brought it up.
Which type you have, and how that specific type is waterproofed. There are three main kinds of skylight. They are each made watertight by a different method. Treating them interchangeably is where the trouble starts. That's because the technique that seals one correctly can be exactly wrong for another.
None of that is exotic once you have been taught it. The problem is that nothing in Utah's roofing licensure requires anyone to learn any of it, so whether your installer knows it is entirely a matter of what they went looking for.
Manufacturer training and a real installation count. Both are voluntary, which is what makes them worth asking about. Both are easy for a qualified company to answer right away. A company that has done this work will tell you how they learned and roughly how many they have done without needing to check.
Master Roofing holds VELUX Signature dealer and installer status, with hands-on factory training done in Reno. That is the shape of answer to listen for from anyone, not just from us. Specific, checkable, and offered without hesitation is what you want. A general reassurance that they handle skylights all the time is not the same thing.
Decide about the skylight before the roof work is scheduled, rather than during it. A reroof is the natural moment to deal with an aging skylight. That's because the surrounding roof is already open and the flashing gets integrated into new material instead of woven into an existing roof.
Deciding late is how people end up with a brand new roof and a twenty-year-old skylight sitting in the middle of it. That's the worst of both options.
That third path is the one to think hardest about. That's because a new roof around an old skylight puts the oldest, most failure-prone detail in the middle of everything else being new.
Master Roofing paid a lot of tuition to learn skylights. Not just the factory training in Reno, though we did that too. The real tuition was the early jobs where we made mistakes and had to work out why. Our mistakes did not make roofs leak, because we are good roofers and we caught them. But there was much more to it than roofing around a hole. We found that out the way everyone does.
I want to be fair to the companies that say no to this work. Declining a job outside your competence is the honest move. I would rather a homeowner hear no than hear yes from someone guessing.
Skylights do not have a bad reputation in Utah because skylights are bad. They have it because people who never learned to install them install a lot of them. So ask the training question. Ask for the number. If a company cannot answer either one quickly, that is not a reason to give up on the skylight, it is a reason to find someone who can.
This article is general information about Utah roofs, not an assessment of yours. Every roof is different, and no article can tell you what is actually happening on your specific house. Have a licensed roofing contractor look at it in person before you act on anything here.
A general contractor or remodeler can cut the opening, frame it. Finish the interior beautifully, and that work is really valuable. What decides whether it leaks is the roof side: the flashing and how it integrates with the surrounding courses. Whoever does the interior work, someone who really understands roofing should be responsible for everything happening above the deck.
It matters most on the details that a simple roof never makes obvious. The flashing method depends on the skylight type rather than on how complicated the roof is. The sealant rules are specific to the product. A straightforward roof plane does make the placement easier, which helps. But it does not change what the installation itself actually requires.
Not necessarily, provided they tell you and you can find out who is actually doing the work. Some companies keep a specialist relationship rather than training in-house. That arrangement can work very well. What you want to avoid is discovering afterwards that the work went to someone nobody vetted. Ask directly, and ask who warranties that portion of the job.
Usually yes, if the unit has real age on it. The surrounding roof is already open, the flashing integrates into new material. You avoid paying twice for access to the same part of the roof. Replacing a skylight later means disturbing a roof that is otherwise sound. That nobody enjoys doing and which adds risk that did not need to exist.
It is evidence rather than a guarantee. It is far better evidence than a general roofing license. That never tests skylight work at all. Factory training means someone was taught that specific product's requirements by the people who actually manufacture it. Pair that with an installation count and a couple of years-old local references. You have a reasonable picture to judge from.
We're here to see what's going on with your roof. A real assessment starts with your history and your attic, not a number from the driveway. You'll get a straight answer about what's up there, what it needs, and what it costs. Sometimes the honest answer is: your roof looks great.