Drone roof inspection in Exeter

Exeter's Georgian and Victorian quarters, the streets around Heavitree Road, St Leonard's and the older parts of Newtown, were built before anyone thought about scaffold access. Pavements are narrow, residents' parking runs down both sides of the road, and there is often no verge or forecourt to stand a tower on without blocking the pavement completely. Getting a scaffold licence from the council for a residential terrace can add weeks before a firm even sets foot on site, and that is before a single tile has been looked at.

A drone does not need a licence to stand on the pavement, because it does not stand on the pavement. It launches from whatever patch of ground is available, a driveway, a side passage, a quiet corner of the street, and gets to roof height in under a minute. For a mid terrace house with no rear access and cars parked tight on both sides, that is often the only realistic way to see the roof at all without a conversation with the highways department first.

Large parts of central Exeter sit inside conservation areas, and the ground around the Cathedral, the Quayside and the older lanes off South Street carries listed building controls on top. Fixing scaffold ties into a listed or conservation area facade is not something a contractor can just get on with. It usually needs sign off, and that conversation alone can hold a job up longer than the roof work itself. None of that applies to a drone flight, because nothing touches the building.

The same logic applies to the Quayside's older warehouse conversions and merchant buildings, where upper floors are now flats and the roofline is shared between several owners. Working out who is responsible for access, and getting agreement from every leaseholder before a tower goes up, can be its own small project. Flying past instead sidesteps all of it and still delivers the same close, clear look at the ridge, the valleys and the chimney stacks.

Out towards Pinhoe, Cranbrook and the post war estates, access is usually simpler, a driveway, a bit of garden, room to work. Even there, a scaffold tower or a ladder against the gutter is still a half day job and a person on the roof, when a drone survey covers the same ground in under fifteen minutes without anyone leaving the ground. For a landlord managing several rental properties across the city, that difference adds up fast when it is repeated house after house.

Marsh Barton is a different problem again, big flat commercial and industrial roofs, felt and single ply, where the issue is not narrow streets but sheer height and awkward access ladders bolted to the side of a unit. The Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced's thermal camera is particularly useful here, picking up trapped moisture under a flat roof membrane that would otherwise only show up once it had already come through the ceiling below.