VELUX integra and manual operation compared

Strip away the model codes and there are three operating systems to choose between. Manual, where you push the window open with your hand or a pole. Electric INTEGRA, where a small motor in the frame does it and takes its power from your mains supply. Solar INTEGRA, where the same kind of motor runs off a battery kept charged by a photovoltaic cell fixed to the top of the sash.

All three sit in the same GGL or GGU roof window, on the same centre-pivot or top-hung hinge, with the same glazing options behind them. The pane, the flashing, the U-value and the G-value are decided separately from how you open the thing. That matters, because it means you never have to accept worse glass to get powered opening, and you never have to give up powered opening to get the glass your roof plane needs. Operation and specification are two different columns on the order, and a good survey fills both in deliberately.

What changes between the three is reach, cost, wiring and what the window can do on its own when you are not there to tell it. Those are the four things worth weighing, so the rest of this guide takes them in turn.

A manual centre-pivot VELUX carries a bar across the top of the sash. That bar is the handle, and it hides more function than most people realise. You pull it to release the catch and swing the window open, and the pivot lets it rotate almost all the way over so the outer face comes inside for cleaning. On a top-hung window the handle sits at the bottom of the sash instead and the whole pane lifts outwards like a flap, which gives an unobstructed view and more headroom at the opening.

Built into that top bar is a ventilation flap. It draws outside air in through a filter even while the window is shut and locked, so you can leave a room ventilating overnight without leaving a security gap or an open pane for the rain. It is a small feature that quietly does a lot of the day-to-day air changing, and it works the same whether the window is otherwise manual or motorised.

For a window you cannot reach standing on the floor, VELUX supplies a telescopic control rod, roughly one to three metres of pole with a hook and a twist grip that engages the bar, opens the pane and works the ventilation flap and the blind. It is a sound answer for a window you open now and then. It is a poor answer for one you want to open twice a day, because a two-metre pole waved at a ceiling stops being charming by about the second week. That practical fact is where most people start thinking about INTEGRA.

An INTEGRA window arrives with the motor, the chain and a rain sensor already fitted in the factory. You do not bolt anything onto the sash later. The motor drives a concealed chain that pushes the pane open and pulls it shut, and it is geared slowly enough that it stops if it meets a hand or an obstruction rather than forcing through it.

Control comes from a wall-mounted touch pad, the KLR 200, that ships in the box and pairs to the window over radio, so it needs no wiring of its own and can sit wherever suits the room. From it you open and close, set the pane to any position rather than just fully open or shut, run the blind if you have a powered one, and program timers, such as a crack of ventilation every morning and a full close at a set hour. Add the small KLF 200 gateway and the same window answers to the VELUX App on a phone, and to the wider VELUX ACTIVE indoor-climate kit, which brings a sensor that reads temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide and can open and close the window on those readings without anyone touching a control at all.

The rain sensor sits on the outside of the sash. The moment it detects rain it drives the window shut on its own, within seconds, whatever the pad or the timer had it doing. That single feature changes how you use a rooflight. You can leave it cracked open for air on a changeable Essex afternoon and trust it to look after itself when a shower comes in off the estuary, which is exactly the situation where a manual window either stays shut and stuffy or gets left open and lets the weather in.

The two motorised versions do the same job. What separates them is where the power comes from, and that decides how disruptive the install is.

Electric INTEGRA runs off your mains. A 230-volt supply is taken to a low-voltage transformer near the window, and the cable is dropped down the roof structure to it. In a new opening, or a loft being plastered out from scratch, that cable is easy to hide and an electrician runs it in while the walls are open. In a finished room it means lifting plasterboard or surface-running trunking, which is why the mains version is the natural choice when other work is already going on around the window.

Solar INTEGRA carries its own power. A photovoltaic panel tucked into the top of the sash keeps a rechargeable battery topped up, and the motor runs from that. There is no cable to the window at all, which makes it the retrofit answer: it goes into a finished ceiling with no chasing, no electrician and no redecoration afterwards. The battery holds enough charge to keep working through a run of dull days, and a south-facing roof in this part of the coast gives the cell more light to work with than most, so it recovers quickly. On a genuinely shaded north slope the solar version still functions, it simply has less daylight to draw on, and that is a point worth raising at survey rather than after.

Height above the finished floor is the honest deciding factor, and south Essex housing throws up plenty of windows that put the decision beyond debate.

The 1930s semi with its rear kitchen extension, of which the patch has an enormous stock, often carries rooflights over a room with an ordinary ceiling, well within reach, where a manual window on a pole is perfectly sensible. The loft conversion is a different building altogether. Convert the roof space of a Victorian or Edwardian villa along the cliff, or a two-storey inter-war semi, and the ridge can sit four or five metres over the new floor. A window set high in that slope, or in a vaulted section with a raised collar, is not something anyone reaches with a rod without it becoming a daily chore.

Bathrooms and en-suites carved into a loft add their own reason. A window over a bath or a shower is a window you should not be poking at with a wet pole while standing in water, and a wall pad by the door is the sane way to work it. Kitchens with a hob under the rooflight want quick opening the moment a pan catches, which a motor gives and a pole in a drawer does not. And any window you would otherwise never bother opening, because reaching it is a faff, is a window whose ventilation you have quietly given up on. Powered opening is often less about luxury than about a window actually getting used.

As a rough rule, a window whose bar sits below about two metres suits manual operation, one between two and about two and a half metres is a judgement call that a control rod can still cover, and anything above that, or over a bath, or that you want on a timer, points at INTEGRA.

This is where the operation choice stops being about comfort and starts touching the problem this coast actually has. Southend faces south across the Thames Estuary, its roofs collect sun through more hours than most of England, and a south-facing rooflight is a solar collector whether you asked for one or not. The right solar-control glazing holds most of that heat out in the first place. But glass only governs what arrives. Getting heat back out of a room once it is in depends entirely on opening the window, and that is an operation question.

Warm air stacks up at the top of a room, precisely where a rooflight sits, so an opening rooflight is the most effective vent a room has: it lets the hottest air leave from the highest point while cooler air draws in low from a door or a wall window. The trick is that the heat you most want gone builds through the afternoon and peaks in the early evening, often when the house is empty. A manual window is shut through all of it. A motorised one on a timer, or reading a climate sensor, can open itself in the late afternoon, purge the day’s heat before you get home, and close again overnight. VELUX ACTIVE will run that cycle automatically on temperature, opening for a cooling night purge and shutting when the room is comfortable.

The rain sensor is what makes any of that usable in an English summer, where a warm afternoon and a passing shower arrive together. Without it, night-purge ventilation means gambling your ceiling on the forecast. With it, the window minds itself. On a south-facing loft bedroom, the kind that reaches 28 degrees by six in the evening and is still uncomfortable at midnight, the combination of solar-control glass and a rooflight that vents itself after dark does more for a night’s sleep than any amount of fiddling with a pole. Our approach starts with the glass, through VELUX window installation specified for the aspect, and then matches the operation to how the room has to shed heat.

The figures below are industry-typical guidance for the operating hardware, not a quotation, and they cover the operation only. The window, the glass and the flashing are priced separately and vary far more by size and specification. Uplift means the rough extra over the same window in manual form.

Two patterns are worth reading out of that table. First, the gap between electric and solar is small on the unit, so the real cost difference between them is the wiring, not the window: in a finished room the solar version usually works out cheaper overall once you count the electrician and the making-good the mains version needs. Second, the jump from manual to motorised is real money per window, so it earns its place where reach or automatic venting justify it and not as a blanket upgrade across a roof full of easy-to-reach units.

You are not locked in by the window you already own. VELUX makes conversion kits that turn a compatible manual centre-pivot window into a motorised one without replacing the whole unit. The KMX 100 kit adds a mains-electric motor and rain sensor, and the KMX 200 kit adds the solar-powered equivalent. Both include the same KLR 200 control pad an INTEGRA window would have come with, so once fitted the converted window behaves like a factory motorised one.

The kits suit a fairly recent manual window in sound condition where the only thing you want to change is how it opens, perhaps because a room’s use has changed, or because reaching it has become a nuisance. They are less sensible on a window near the end of its life or one where the glass is wrong for the aspect, because at that point you are spending on the operation of a unit that wants replacing anyway. Where the pane itself is failing or misted, that is a replacement rather than a conversion, and swapping the whole window lets you correct the glazing specification at the same time. If your existing rooflight is leaking or the flashing has gone, that is a roofing matter to put right first, and a roofer is the right call for the roof itself before any talk of new windows.

Most rooms answer their own question once you look at them honestly. Run through this before you order.

1. How high is the control bar above the floor? Below two metres, manual is usually right. Above roughly two and a half, or over a bath, motorised earns its keep.
2. Which way does the roof plane face? A south or west-facing rooflight that overheats is one you want venting itself in the late afternoon, which favours a motor with a timer or a climate sensor. Settle the glazing for that aspect in the same breath.
3. Is the ceiling finished or open? Open and being plastered out, mains electric is easy and cheapest. Finished and staying that way, solar avoids lifting the ceiling.
4. Will you actually open it? A window that is a chore to reach is a window whose ventilation you have already surrendered. If it needs to work daily, make it easy to work.
5. Do you want it to act on its own? Automatic rain closing, night cooling and app control only come with INTEGRA. If none of that matters and the window is reachable, a manual unit with a control rod is honest value.

One point on the paperwork, whichever operation you pick. A new or enlarged rooflight is notifiable under the Building Regulations, with Part L covering the thermal performance and Part K the safety glazing overhead, and that is true of a manual window and an INTEGRA one alike. We make that notification to Southend-on-Sea City Council, or the relevant local authority for your address, as part of the installation. Whether the window opens by hand or by motor changes nothing about the compliance, only about how you live with it afterwards. If you want the operation and the glazing worked out together for your own roof, plane by plane, ask us for a specification and we will put both on the same page.