Drone roof inspection in Kingsbridge

Fore Street climbs hard from the quay up through the centre of Kingsbridge, and that gradient is the first problem any scaffold contractor runs into. A tower needs level ground to be built safely, and on a street this steep that usually means extra base staging, sometimes built out into the road itself, before the scaffold is even square enough to climb. On a working high street with shops either side, closing part of the road for that is disruptive and not always granted quickly.

A drone does not need the street to be level, it needs a small patch of clear ground nearby, the quay itself, a side turning, a customer car park. It reaches the roof from there and holds position regardless of what the gradient is doing underneath. For a Georgian townhouse partway up Fore Street, that usually means the roof gets checked without a single cone going down on one of the town's busiest streets.

A lot of Kingsbridge's townhouses and cottages are slate hung, meaning the walls carry a second layer of slate as well as the roof, often around dormers and upper storeys. That doubles the amount of surface a standard inspection would want to look at closely, and a scaffold platform built for the roof pitch does not always give a clean view of a hung wall or a dormer cheek sitting at a different angle just below it.

The drone simply moves to whichever face needs a closer look, roof, dormer, hung wall, without needing separate scaffold lifts for each one. On a steep, tightly packed street where every extra scaffold lift adds cost and disruption, being able to photograph the roof and the slate hanging around a dormer in the same flight is a real practical saving, not just a convenience.

South Hams AONB spreads out from Kingsbridge in every direction, and a lot of the farmhouses across it sit at the end of long private tracks, some barely wide enough for a car, let alone a scaffold lorry loaded with poles and boards. Getting a scaffold crew and their equipment out to an isolated farmhouse can mean a half day just on access before any roof work starts, and that cost gets passed straight to the owner.

A drone crew drives to wherever the track allows a vehicle to stop, then flies the rest of the way. There is no equipment to carry down a rutted lane, no towing a trailer over ground it was never built for. For a farmhouse roof out towards the Salcombe road, that difference in setup time is often the difference between a quick, affordable check and a job that needs scheduling weeks in advance to justify the access cost.