Drone inspection services in Okehampton

Dartmoor forces Atlantic air upwards right on the doorstep of this town. Rainfall is high, driving rain is frequent, and roofs stay wet for long periods. Anywhere else on this list the weather is a factor in a maintenance plan; here it is the plan.

What that does to a commercial building is straightforward and relentless. Coatings chalk and fail early. Fixings and washers perish. Sealant joints on panel systems go before their nominal life. Gutters never dry out, so silt stays wet and corrosion works at the joints continuously rather than seasonally. Anything specified to a national average will underperform here.

The correct response is a shorter interval and a specific focus on the west and south-west faces, which take the driving rain. A building recorded every year here tells you more than the same building recorded every three years in a sheltered valley, because the rate of change is high enough to be measurable.

The commercial ground on the Exeter Road side and around the A30 carries the town's industrial and trade units: portal frame, profiled sheet, a mix of ages, and generous yards. It is the ordinary building type, in a climate that is anything but ordinary.

The specific thing to watch on this stock is mechanical fixing at the perimeter. Gusting off the moor loads the edges of a roof far harder than the middle, and where a fixing pattern was specified generically the perimeter is where it will be found wanting. On a wide aerial pass a lifted or fluttering sheet edge is visible in a way it never is from inside the building.

Granite and slate on the older town centre buildings is a separate matter again, with bedded ridges and stone detailing that behaves differently to anything on the estate.

The surrounding parishes carry scattered moorland farms and longhouses with corrugated metal ranges, and those buildings sit a long way from anything. Getting an inspection to them conventionally means somebody travelling out with equipment for a single roof.

From the air a whole holding is covered in one visit, and the record includes the buildings nobody would have bothered to look at. On a moorland farm that is often where the problem actually is, because the buildings that matter least get the least attention until the day one of them fails.

The town also sits at the head of a substantial network of infrastructure: the A30 corridor, the restored railway and Meldon viaduct beyond it, and the utility and communications structures that come with a moorland edge. Masts, compounds and remote plant buildings all fall into the category of assets somebody owns, somebody insures, and almost nobody looks at, because reaching them means a journey and a climb. Those are exactly the assets an aircraft covers efficiently, and they are usually the ones missing from a maintenance schedule entirely.