Wind

I dislike strong winds when I'm at home: they scare me. Not scare, exactly, but worry.
There's a large roof-window set into the flat part of our roof, which provides light for our stair-well. It's about a meter square. About fifteen years ago, some cowboy roofers managed to drop a hammer onto the glass, so they had to replace it. Unknown to us, they replaced the glass with a pane that was about half an inch too small for the frame, so they bodged the new glass into place with mastic and putty.

Some years later, the huge lumps of putty which they used dried out, and cracked away from both the glass and frame. Consequently, the glass slipped and started to fall into the stair-well. Fortunately, I'd installed a secondary glazing panel of transparent plastic just after we moved into this house, flush with the ceiling below the rooflight. If it hadn't been for the extra layer of plastic (polystyrene, I think) we'd have had ten kilos of glass falling on our heads.

Anyway, I had to do something about it, quickly. Extracting the pane of glass and lowering it to the ground took quite an affort, and hoisting anything to replace up to our roof, wasn't easy. To keep the rain out, I replaced the undersized piece of thick 6mm glass with some thin, 2mm transparent acrylic we had lying in the shed. It has worked fine, for more than five years (I think) but the sheeting is really too thin.

In high winds, it flutters. It goes brrrrrrrrr when the wind is in the wrong direction, and I worry. What if it breaks, and flies away in the night? Every time the wind rises, I have difficuly sleeping, and I wake at the sight noises of the plastic bending. I ought to replace it with something thicker; say 5 or 7mm, but it will be lots of effort. Or we could buy a prefabricated rooflight, but that would cost loads of money and almost as much effort to organise. So instead, I worry when the wind is high.