Drone roof survey in Crediton

Crediton itself is a straightforward market town, but most of the roof work in this area is out in the Creedy valley and the lanes beyond it. Farmhouses, barn conversions, cottages and agricultural buildings sit at the end of tracks that are narrow, sunken, hedged on both sides and soft underfoot for half the year.

Getting scaffolding to those buildings is expensive when it is possible and impossible when it is not. Owners routinely leave a roof unchecked for a decade because the cost of finding out has always been out of proportion to the cost of the likely repair.

A survey visit needs a vehicle in the yard. From there the aircraft covers the house, the outbuildings and the barn in a single flight, which is what makes checking a whole holding at once realistic.

A typical Crediton area property has more than one roof and often more than one covering. The house might be Devon slate laid to a traditional lap, the linhay behind it corrugated metal, and a converted barn a mixture of original stone tile and modern interlocking tile introduced during conversion.

Each fails differently and on a different timescale. Devon slate is increasingly difficult and costly to match, so knowing early that individual slates are slipping matters more here than on a concrete tiled estate where replacements are a phone call away.

Corrugated sheet on the outbuildings is the one people most often neglect and the one with the most immediate safety consequence. Fixings rust through, a corner starts to lift, and eventually a sheet leaves the building in a gale, which around livestock and machinery is a serious matter.

There is a lot of thatch in the parishes around Crediton, and the same logic applies as anywhere: the ridge goes first, and the ridge is the part nobody can inspect. Flown imagery answers the question of how much life is left in a ridge in twenty minutes, which lets an owner budget for a rethatch instead of being surprised by one.

The area is also open to Atlantic weather coming in from the west with very little to break it, so exposed properties on the higher ground between the valleys take sustained wind and driving rain.

That combination, wet air and constant wind, is hard on thatch ridges and hard on the lime mortar pointing that older Devon slate roofs rely on. Both are things a survey can quantify before they become a bill.

Holy Cross Church and the handful of substantial houses around Crediton, Downes among them, carry the same access problem as any farm in the area but with a roof complicated enough to need proper planning before a flight: multiple ranges, older lead work and, on the church, a tower that no scaffold company would price cheaply. Flying it is not just cheaper, it is often the only way anybody looks at the whole roof in one go.