Price depends on four things:

• The size
• The type of lens
• Whether you go acrylic or glass
• What roof system you have

Curb mount versus self-flashing changes the labor. So does how efficient you want the finished product to be.

Every roof is different, so treat that as a ballpark rather than a quote. We will give you a real number once we have looked at it.

It depends on whether you want light or you want a view.

If you are just trying to bring natural light into a space and it is not going to be a focal point, a solar tube is quick and easy. If you want to look up and see the sky, and you want the skylight to be part of the room, then it has to be a skylight.

See how solar light tubes work

On a single story home, a skylight or a solar tube is a great solution. Interior rooms, hallways, bathrooms and closets are exactly where this works best, because they have no exterior wall to put a window in.

Glass skylights are fantastic. The price tag is the problem.

If your skylight is going to be a focal point, if you want to sit around the island in your kitchen and look up at the sky, glass is worth it. But on the U factor, which is the skylight equivalent of an R value, an acrylic skylight installed properly with the right gaskets performs very well against glass for a fraction of the price.

There is also more flexibility with acrylic. You can combine different lens options to get the light quality you want. With glass you are limited to about three.

Acrylic skylights or glass skylights

There is a big misconception about what it means to repair a skylight.

A lot of people go to the hardware store, buy silicone, and put it on the skylight. Read the instructions. Silicone eats acrylic. If you are going to do a repair, make sure the sealant is ammonia free and the surface is clean, and do not expect more than a year or two out of it. Sealants expand, contract and shrink. Think about concrete poured up against something. Eventually it cracks away and starts funneling water toward the joint instead of away from it.

If your skylight is not working, the question is what the root cause is. Is a weep hole blocked? Was it installed wrong from the beginning? Is the lens cracked? If it is something simple, like weep holes blocked because nobody removed the protective plastic, a gasket kit and a small modification to the frame will get you years. Other than that, about 90 percent of the time you are looking at replacing the lenses.

See skylight repair in Tucson

Sometimes you can replace just the lens.

The complication is that over the last 20 or 30 years, 20 or 30 different manufacturers have sold skylights in Tucson. On a lot of these, a quarter inch or a half inch means everything. That lens will not fit, and you need a custom one made.

Once you add up two custom lenses and possibly a new retainer ring so you can get a proper seal, it is usually a wash. At that point you are better off with a new skylight than trying to make an old frame work with new parts.

From the inside, grab a bucket. That is honestly it.

Then wait until it is safe. If you are not someone who gets on roofs regularly, do not use the ladder you inherited from your grandfather. Call us instead. Tell us if you need us to bring a tarp and we will do something to help you manage it until it can be repaired properly.

Call (520) 668-9249

There is a simple tell.

If the water is coming from the skylight, you will see the trail running from the top of the skylight well down the drywall. If it is coming from the roof, you usually will not see that trail. You will just see it appear on the drywall.

Look up. Here is what to look for:

• A brown ring or stain around the outside, which is a water mark and means the lens is filling with water
• Visible cracks, which are obvious enough
• Color and feel, which is the one most people miss

A newer acrylic lens that is still working is a brighter white and it is soft to the touch. As they reach the end of their life they turn yellow and opaque and go very hard and brittle. That is the material drying out, and brittle acrylic cracks easily.

The risk is what it costs you later.

Water mitigation, drywall, paint, wood floors. Plus the time of having several different companies in your home and coordinating all of it. Compare that against staying ahead of it for a few hundred dollars and being done for another 15 or 20 years.

Several ways.

From the roof, look for noticeable cracks around the base, and look at whether it connects into the roof system cleanly or looks tacked on.

Then look closely where the retainer ring meets the lens. Are there knife marks where somebody scored the acrylic? We see this constantly. A roofer installs a skylight and uses a knife to cut the protective film instead of removing the retainer ring. That knife score creates spider cracking all the way around the lens within a year or two. On top of that, the leftover plastic trapped under the retainer ring cooks in this heat, breaks down, and blocks the weep holes, which causes a leak.

It is only a matter of time before the lens cracks or the weep holes block and water overruns the channels.

From the inside, a brown ring around the outside or visible cracking from the sides tells you the same thing. One caveat: in a bathroom, or in a kitchen over a cooking area, some condensation is normal from steam. Modern skylights have changed their internal weeping systems so condensation can move through the channel instead of collecting where you see it.

The biggest ones get decided before anyone gets on the roof.

What type of skylight, what lens selection, and where in the home it is going. How high are your ceilings. How deep the light well is. Those choices determine how the skylight actually performs, and most people never get asked about them.

Then there is the install itself, meaning how it ties into your existing roof system. And the human factor, which is whether the person doing it actually understands skylights or is skipping steps that set you up for damage later.

Skylights are simple, but they are not. The ones sold at the big box stores, and even at roofing wholesale yards, do not come with the extra gaskets, the dust and bug guard, or a large gasket that creates a positive airtight seal.

People call us wanting to close up their skylights entirely because of heat. I go out and inspect, and it is a single lens. A single lens does not meet code, but a builder bought the cheapest option available and that is what went in. One dome with no gaskets is going to let in an enormous amount of heat. A skylight with at least two lenses, installed correctly, is a night and day difference.

There is a big misconception that glass is the only way to get an efficient skylight. An acrylic skylight installed properly with the right gaskets can match or beat a glass one.

Covers and shades for glare and heat

Efficiency in a skylight is measured by U factor. Doors, windows and walls use R value. Skylights and windows use U factor.

In the Southwest you can achieve a very good U factor with the proper gaskets, thick acrylic, and a proper tie-in to your roof system. Both acrylic and glass can perform at a high level.

They can, if they are not sealed properly.

A properly sealed skylight and a properly sealed solar tube do not let in the heat people expect. When we get a call about too much heat, we get there and find it is not sealed and is open to the outside. That is where the heat is coming from.

We install skylights on flat roofs constantly. Foam roofs are their own situation.

The thing that matters on a low slope roof is that you do not want water sitting against your skylight. A lot of the calls we get are homeowners saying the skylight is leaking when it is really the roof. Somebody cut the opening and set the skylight lower than the surrounding roof surface, so water ponds in the well.

We build that up so water is not sitting there. It comes down to understanding watershed. If you are installing a skylight, what are you doing to keep water from ponding in or around it?

See skylight installation in Tucson

Yes, but it is a much bigger job than people expect.

On tile you have one option, and that is a curb mount. Tying into the roof system means removing a much larger area of tile so you can get to the underlayment properly, because water gets under tile all the time.

So a two by two skylight means pulling up something closer to an eight by eight area. That means:

• New underlayment
• Building a wood curb and tying it into the roof system
• New battens
• Custom flashings

You cannot go to a supply house and ask for a skylight flashing for a tile roof. It does not exist. You have to understand how to divert water into the flashing, around it, back on top of the tile, and then reinstall the tile so it looks like nothing was ever there.

Everyone has seen a bad tile install where the tiles are buckled up all around the skylight. It can absolutely be done well. It just takes the work.

That is a great time to do it.

A well installed skylight generally lasts 15 to 25 years. If yours are in that range, or north facing, why not tie it all into the roof system at the same time while the roof is open?

Most roofing contractors have language stating that if anyone else touches the roof, whether for a skylight or a repair, it voids their coverage and sometimes the manufacturer’s coverage as well. This is true on commercial roofs too.

But if you contact the roofing company, tell them the work is happening, and the contractor doing the skylight takes responsibility for that penetration, it does not legally void anything.

It can, if the damage came from hail or a windstorm.

But often it is not worth running through insurance, because the deductible is more than the job. If you have a $2,000 or $3,000 deductible and the replacement is $1,500, there is nothing to claim.

If the skylight is being replaced as part of a roof that insurance is covering, sometimes it rolls in and sometimes it does not. That depends entirely on the adjuster.

Sometimes, and some of them are strict.

I have run into HOAs that require every skylight frame to be white, bronze, brown or mill finish. I have seen HOAs with restrictions on what color lens you are allowed to use.

I get this constantly.

What I tell people is that you would be surprised how many roofing companies call me and say they cannot trust their own crews to install skylights. We install skylights for a number of roofing contractors here in Tucson for exactly that reason.

Skylights are simple, but they are not. Without the right gaskets, the right sealants and the knowhow, a skylight is one of the biggest sources of leaks on any roof.

If there are going to be real problems, they usually show up in the first couple of years. After that, every five years is a safe interval.

You can also do a basic check yourself. Walk around the house and look up:

• Is there a dark ring around the skylight?
• Any cracking?
• Any yellowing?

That covers most of it.