Drone inspection services in Exmouth

Where the Exe meets the sea, two miles of open seafront, and south-westerlies arriving off the water with nothing to break them. That single fact governs almost everything about maintaining a commercial building in this town. Fixings and flashings corrode faster than they do eight miles up the estuary, wind uplift on ridges and verges is a recurring problem rather than a storm event, and anything galvanised has a shorter working life than the specification assumed.

On the seafront blocks the flat roofs and rendered parapets take it hardest. Salt gets into the render, the coping joints open, and the parapet upstand where the covering turns up is the first thing to fail. On the marina and docks stock, the metalwork goes first: gutter joints, plant frames, ladder fixings, cable tray supports.

It means the sensible inspection interval here is shorter than inland. A building in Cullompton might reasonably be recorded every other year. A comparable building on this front is better looked at annually, because the rate of change is different enough to matter and a two year gap hides the trend.

The redeveloped waterside around the docks and marina mixes modern apartment and commercial blocks with older marine structures, and the two age at completely different speeds. New single-ply and standing seam roofs sit alongside surviving corrugated sheds, pontoon buildings and quayside structures that have been patched for decades.

For anybody managing a block here the interest is usually the roof plant, the terraces and the perimeter details rather than the covering itself. Modern coverings on these buildings tend to be sound; the failures come from where somebody has fixed something to them since handover.

The older marine structures are the opposite problem. The covering is the issue, corrosion is advanced and visible, and the useful thing a record does is establish the rate rather than the state, so a replacement can be planned rather than triggered by a failure.

Away from the water the commercial stock is more ordinary and easier to plan for. Light industrial units at Liverton, the retail and trade premises along the main approach roads, and a good deal of school, healthcare and community estate that carries the same flat roof and plant problems as anything commercial.

One visit covers a spread of those, and where an owner or an agent holds both a seafront building and a unit inland the report shows exactly how different the two decay curves are. That comparison is often the argument that gets a maintenance budget agreed.

The town's postcode area covers a mix that is easy to underestimate: seafront commercial, the marina and dock buildings, the retail and trade premises inland at Withycombe Raleigh and Littleham, and the schools and community buildings that sit between them. Orcombe Point and the red cliffs mark the eastern edge of that spread and also mark where the exposure is at its worst. Anything at that end of the front is in the hardest position the town has, and its inspection interval should reflect that rather than matching a building half a mile inland.