Skylight Repair & Replacement in Chester County, PA

Step flashing runs up each side of the frame in pieces woven between the shingle courses, with a solid head flashing across the top and an apron along the bottom. When that metal rusts through, gets nailed in the wrong place, or was never lapped correctly, rain walks straight under the shingles.

Next is the seal between the glass and the frame. Gaskets and glazing tapes dry out and shrink after years of sun, and the frame can look fine from the room below with water seeping through one corner.

Older plastic domes craze and crack, and a split dome means a new unit.

Leaves and pine needles pile up on the uphill side of a skylight and hold moisture against the flashing. On a low-pitch slope, that pile can push water up and over the metal in a heavy storm.

Some skylights sit on a raised curb, a box built up from the roof deck. Others are fastened directly to the deck. Curb-mounted units often have a separate flashing that can be redone without disturbing the glass, while deck-mounted units tie more tightly into the shingles around them. We identify which you have on the first visit, because it changes the scope.

Warm, damp air from a bathroom or kitchen hits cold glass and turns to water. On a January morning that can run down the frame and drip on the floor with no rain anywhere in the forecast. Bathrooms get it worst.

Keep track of when it happens. Water on dry, cold mornings points toward condensation. Water that follows rain or melting snow points toward the roof. If you cannot tell, a photo with the date on it is useful when we come out.

When the shingles come off, the old flashing comes off with them. On our tear-offs, old skylight flashing almost always needs to be rebuilt instead of reused. That makes a re-roof the sensible time to look hard at the unit itself, since swapping an old skylight later means disturbing new shingles.

If your skylights are still in good shape, we flash them back in and leave them alone. Our page on roof replacement in West Chester covers the rest of that job, and a roof inspection in West Chester is a good way to get the skylight question answered first.

Snow sits on the uphill side of the frame, melts against the warmer glass, and refreezes along the bottom edge. The same freeze and thaw cycle that pries up flashing elsewhere on a roof works hard at a skylight, since it has flashing on all four sides. Our guide on preventing ice dams on a Chester County roof covers the attic side of that problem.

Hail can crack plastic domes and dent metal cladding, and it often marks the shingles around the unit too. When a storm is the cause, the skylight goes in the same photo set as the rest of the roof damage.