How do you control an electric rooflight?

Every electric rooflight has a motor in the frame that winds the sash open against a spring or a screw thread and drives it closed again. What differs between products is how you tell that motor what to do. There are three common methods and plenty of units offer more than one at once.

• A wired wall switch. A rocker or keypad fixed to the wall, cabled back to the rooflight. Press up, the roof opens; press down, it shuts; let go partway and it stops where it is. It never runs out of battery and there is nothing to lose down the back of the sofa. The catch is that the cable has to be run through the ceiling and wall during the build, so it is a decision you make early rather than an afterthought.
• A wireless handset. A battery remote that talks to a receiver in the rooflight over radio. No cable to the switch position, so you can add or move the control after the unit is fitted, and one handset can drive several rooflights either together or one at a time. You do have to keep it charged or in batteries, and it needs to stay in radio range, which in a normal house is not a problem.
• An app or voice control. The rooflight joins your home network through a small gateway, and you open it from a phone, a tablet or a voice assistant. This is the option that lets you schedule the roof, group it with blinds, or have it react to a temperature reading rather than a button press.

Most people end up with a combination. A wired keypad by the door for everyday use, a handset for the times you are already sitting under the glass, and the app in reserve for scheduling. The motor does not care which one sent the signal.

The motor itself needs power whichever control method you pick, and that is a separate question from how you send it commands. Two arrangements are common.

A mains-powered unit takes a fused spur from your ring main, usually run to the rooflight during the wiring stage and terminated at a transformer near the frame. This suits a lantern or a large non-opening rooflight that is never coming out, and it is the tidiest answer when the ceiling is open anyway. A qualified electrician makes the final connection, because it is a mains circuit and falls under the wiring regulations.

A low-voltage or solar-assisted unit runs the motor off a small onboard battery, topped up either by a plug-in charger or by a little photovoltaic panel built into the flashing. Because there is no mains cable to the sash, the whole thing can be fitted without disturbing your electrics, which is why it is often the sensible choice on a replacement where you do not want to open the ceiling up more than you must. The trade-off is a slower motor and a limit on how many times a day it will cycle before the battery needs the sun to catch up.

If you are having the work done as part of a wider job, the wiring route and the control positions are things to settle up front. Our electric skylight installation work always starts with where the switch lives and how the cable gets there, because retrofitting a wired control after the plaster is on means chasing a wall you have just finished.

The feature that sells electric rooflights to most people is the one you never press: the rain sensor. A small moisture pad sits on the outside of the frame, and the instant it detects rain it drives the sash shut regardless of what the handset last told it. Leave the house with the roof open, get caught out by an estuary shower, and the unit closes itself before the carpet knows about it.

A few things are worth knowing about how they behave. The sensor closes the roof but does not reopen it once the rain stops, so on a showery day you may find it shut when you expected it open. It closes to a seal, not a slam, so it will gently override a held-open position rather than trap anything. And because it is reading actual moisture, a heavy dew or a passing hosepipe will trip it just as real rain does, which is a feature rather than a fault. If keeping the room ventilated through light weather matters to you, a rain sensor paired with a rain-protected ventilation flap lets a little air through while the main sash is closed.

Wind is the other half of the story. Some controllers accept a wind or temperature input as well, so the roof can be told to shut in a gust or open when the room passes a set temperature. On an exposed south Essex roof that faces the open water, a wind trigger is worth asking about, because the weather off the estuary arrives with nothing inland to slow it down.

Once a rooflight is on your home network, the button becomes just one of several ways to move it. You can set it to crack open at seven in the morning to clear overnight stuffiness, close at dusk, or open the moment a room sensor reads 24 degrees. Grouped with electric blinds, a single command can open the glass and drop the shades in one go.

Before you commit to a smart setup, check which system the rooflight speaks. Some use their own radio protocol and need a bridge to reach your wider home network; others plug straight into a mainstream ecosystem. If you already run a particular voice assistant or hub, confirm the unit is compatible with it rather than assuming, because retrofitting a bridge later is more fiddly than choosing the right receiver at the start. Ask the installer to hand over the pairing details and any hub passwords at the end, so the system is yours to reconfigure and not locked to a setup you cannot get into.

An electric rooflight is not only a convenience. On a south-facing roof it is one of the better tools you have against summer overheating, because you can drive hot air out of the room from its highest point at the press of a button. Heat collects at the top of a space, and an opening rooflight sat up there acts as a chimney: open it and the hot layer leaves, pulling cooler air in low down. Schedule that to happen automatically on warm afternoons and the room manages itself.

The control only moves the air, though. It does nothing about the sun landing on the glass in the first place, and around here that is the larger problem. Southend faces south across the Thames Estuary with an open horizon and light bouncing off the water, so a south-facing rear extension collects sun from mid-morning until the sun swings west. The automation helps you shed the heat that gets in; the glass specification decides how much gets in at all. The two work together, which is why we look at the G-value of the glazing alongside the motor and the sensors rather than treating the electric part as the whole answer. Our energy-efficient skylight installation pages set out how a low G-value unit and an opening one earn their keep side by side, and on a flat roof skylight installation we often pair a non-opening solar-control pane with a single electric opening unit rather than push the glass harder.

Work out three things before anyone quotes you: where you want the switch, whether you would rather run a mains cable now or use a solar-charged motor to avoid opening the ceiling, and whether you want the roof to react to weather and temperature on its own. Those answers shape the wiring, and the wiring is far easier to get right before the plaster than after.

If you would like us to size the opening, specify the glass and set out the control options for your roof, tell us the orientation and the rough opening and we will come back with a plan and a price. Ring 01702 898232 or request a quote, and we will look at how the whole roof behaves in the sun, not just how the motor moves.