Drone inspection services in Ivybridge

The commercial weight here is on the A38 side of the town, at Lee Mill and the associated industrial ground, where the buildings are distribution and manufacturing sheds serving Plymouth and the wider South Hams. Big spans, deep plan, substantial yards, and a construction date mostly in the last fifty years.

That relative youth is a mixed blessing. The coverings are usually sound systems rather than legacy materials, but many are now at the age where the fixings and the sealant details reach the end of their design life even though the sheets themselves look fine. It is a stage that produces very few obvious symptoms and a lot of small failures.

Watch the perimeter and the penetrations. On a shed of this vintage the middle of the roof will typically outlast the details at its edges and around anything cut through it, which is exactly the opposite of where a ground-level inspection would look.

The moor drops steeply to the South Hams here and the Erme valley funnels wind through the town, so gusting is stronger and more directional than the general exposure of South Devon would suggest. Mechanically fixed ridge and verge details matter more here than in a sheltered position.

For a large-span roof that means uplift at the edges is the load case that matters. Sheets do not usually fail in the field; they let go at a verge, a ridge closure or an eaves detail and then peel. Catching a single loose or fluttering edge fixing is worth far more than a general note that the roof is in fair condition.

Rainfall is high with the moor immediately north, so the wetting problems that go with that apply as they do further west, just slightly less severely than at Okehampton or Tavistock.

Away from the industrial ground, the town is overwhelmingly late twentieth century residential with a modest commercial centre: retail units, a small amount of office, community and school estate, and the older mill core around the bridge.

The public estate is often the more interesting part of that for anybody responsible for it. School and community buildings of the 1970s and 1980s carry flat roofs, roof lights, and plant that has been replaced at least once, and they very rarely get inspected from above between refurbishment cycles.

The Erme valley also carries the town's older mill and industrial site, and the viaduct and railway structures that run through it. Those are a different order of asset again: tall, difficult to reach, and of interest to whoever holds them for structural rather than weatherproofing reasons. Photographing high structures from a standoff position is straightforward from the air and expensive by any other method, which is why bridge and viaduct owners were among the earlier commercial adopters of this kind of inspection.