A skylight brings real light into a dark hallway or bathroom, but it is also a hole cut in the roof, and every hole is a place water wants to get in. Most skylight leaks are not the glass. They are the flashing and the seal around it. Orian Construction & Roofing repairs leaking skylights and installs new ones across Los Angeles County.
When a skylight leaks, most people assume the unit has failed. Usually it has not. The water is getting in around the skylight, at the flashing that ties it into the roof or the seal where the frame meets the curb. A skylight interrupts the roof surface, so it needs its own set of flashing pieces to route water around and past it. When those pieces corrode, lift, or were installed poorly to begin with, the roof leaks at the skylight even though the skylight itself is fine.
This matters because the fix is different depending on the cause. A leak from failed flashing is a reflashing job, and the skylight stays. A leak from a cracked seal or a fogged, failed unit means the skylight is replaced. And sometimes what looks like a leak is actually condensation forming on the inside of the glass on a cold morning, which is a ventilation issue rather than a roof one. We sort out which it is before we quote, using the same tracing behind our leak detection. Our article on skylights and leaks covers what usually goes wrong.
Because a skylight lives at a roof transition, the work overlaps with our flashing repair and general roof repair. If your skylight is leaking as part of a larger roof problem, we handle both at once.
When the flashing has failed, we strip it back and rebuild it with new metal, tying the skylight properly into the roof so water routes around it.
A cracked, fogged, or seal-failed skylight gets swapped for a new one, flashed and sealed as part of the swap so the new unit starts dry.
We cut, frame, and flash a new skylight into the roof, choosing a location and a unit that fits the room below and the roof above.
Where a full skylight will not fit, a tubular sun tunnel channels daylight from the roof into a hallway or closet with a small, well-sealed opening.
The metal around the skylight corrodes or lifts, and water slips past it into the ceiling. The most common skylight leak we see.
Flashing repair →Skylights sealed with caulk instead of proper flashing fail as the caulk dries and cracks in the sun. We rebuild them the right way.
Roof repair →Water on the inside of the glass on a cold morning is often condensation from a poorly ventilated room, not the roof. We check before we quote.
Ventilation →Family owned and based on Ventura Blvd in Sherman Oaks. A skylight is only as dry as the flashing around it, so that is where we do the work.
If the flashing has failed but the skylight is sound, reflashing keeps the unit and solves the leak. Replacement makes sense when the skylight itself has gone: the seal between the glass panes has failed and fogged the unit, the frame is cracked, or an old dome has yellowed and gone brittle in the sun. Because so much of the labor is in the flashing either way, replacing an old unit while the roof is open is often the sensible move rather than reflashing a skylight that is near the end of its life.
If you are already having roofing work done, it is a good time to address the skylights. During a roof replacement or reroof, the skylight flashing gets rebuilt as part of the job, and swapping an old unit then costs less than doing it on its own later. A roof inspection flags a skylight that is heading toward trouble before it leaks.
We repair and install skylights for homeowners across the county from our shop on Ventura Blvd in Sherman Oaks. A few of the areas we serve:
Leaking skylight or thinking about adding one? Tell us what is going on and we will come out and give you a written estimate.