Drone inspection services in Crediton

Crediton's commercial ground sits mainly on the flat beside the Creedy, with Lords Meadow carrying the bulk of the town's industrial and trade units. The stock is a mix of decades, and much of it is straightforward: portal frame, profiled sheet, box gutters, a good proportion of trade counter and small workshop use.

The valley position is the qualifier. Steep red sandstone hills rise on either side, the valley traps damp air, and the town is open to Atlantic weather from the west with little to shelter it. Roofs here get wet and stay wet, and anything on a north-facing slope stays wet longer again.

The practical result is that gutters and rooflights are the recurring findings rather than anything structural, and that a building here needs looking at more often than its construction date alone would suggest.

This is some of the most productive farmland in Devon, and a large part of the commercially significant building stock around the town is agricultural: grain stores, packhouses, machinery sheds, livestock buildings and the corrugated metal ranges that go with them. Those are working buildings with real value in them and they are almost never inspected.

They are also among the most dangerous roofs to walk in the country. Fragile roof lights and aged cement sheeting on farm buildings account for a steady toll of serious injuries every year, and the buildings are usually remote, often unoccupied during the working day, and rarely covered by anybody's planned maintenance schedule.

An aerial pass over a farm's building group takes under an hour, covers every roof on the holding, and produces a record that a grain store insurer, a lender or a diversification project can actually use. It is a very different proposition to somebody climbing onto a cement sheet roof with a ladder.

The long high street carries Georgian and Victorian commercial premises, and thatch appears on cottages and outbuildings across the surrounding lanes. Thatch is not a drone maintenance item in the usual sense, but the ridge condition, the netting and the interfaces where a thatched range meets a slated or tiled one are all visible from above and all difficult to assess otherwise.

For a commercial owner with a mixed group of buildings, the useful thing is the single record: the modern unit, the older range and the outbuildings all photographed on the same day and written up together, so one budget conversation covers the lot.

Barn conversions are worth singling out because they sit awkwardly between building types. A converted range is a commercial or residential asset with an agricultural roof, and the covering underneath a conversion is frequently the original one with insulation and a new ceiling below it. That combination hides the early signs of failure completely from inside, and the first indication is usually a stain appearing months after the water started getting in. Recording the roof from above is the only way to see the covering itself rather than the ceiling under it.