Devon · PL21
Drone services in Ivybridge
A moor edge commuter town built almost entirely between the 1970s and the 1990s, which brings the whole place to the same maintenance age at once.
A town of one age
Ivybridge is unusual because it is overwhelmingly a late twentieth century town. Large estates from the 1970s through to the 1990s make up most of the housing, with only a small historic core around the old bridge and mill.
That has a consequence nobody expects: the whole town reaches the same maintenance age at the same time. Concrete interlocking tile from that period is durable, but the mortar bedding on ridges and verges is not, and neither are the fibre cement slates used on some of the later phases.
So the enquiries here cluster around a short list: ridge tiles moving, verge mortar cracked and falling, a slipped tile on the weather slope, and flat roofs on garages and extensions that have reached the end of a felt covering's life.
It also means neighbours tend to ring within weeks of each other, because the same detail is failing along a whole street rather than on one unlucky house.
The moor edge, and what it does to a roof
Dartmoor drops steeply to the town, so the northern streets sit noticeably higher than the southern ones and the Erme valley funnels wind down through the middle of it.
High rainfall and strong gusting winds are the result, and that is exactly the condition mechanically fixed ridge and verge details were designed for. Mortar bedded ridges, which is what a lot of this stock has, are not.
The practical upshot is that a ridge here has a shorter life than the same ridge would have in a sheltered market town, and the difference is measured in years rather than decades.
The gradient across the town also means two identical houses on the same estate can be in visibly different condition depending on which end of the street they sit.
Garages, extensions and conservatories
Estate housing of this age comes with a lot of added flat roofs: garages, single storey extensions, porches and conservatory junctions.
Those are where most of the water gets in. Ponding in one corner, a splitting felt seam, an upstand that has come away from the wall, an outlet that has silted up. None of it visible from the garden and all of it clear from directly above.
Conservatory to house junctions deserve their own mention, because they combine a change of material, a change of pitch and a wall, which is three chances to fail in one detail.
Land, the viaduct and the wider parish
Beyond the estates the parish runs up onto the moor edge, with farmland, tracks and boundaries that suit a top-down record rather than a walked inspection.
The viaduct and the Erme valley bring occasional landscape work, and the Two Moors Way brings the sort of access and route recording that has nothing to do with buildings at all.
Dartmoor's restricted ground sits close enough north of the town that anything on that side gets checked properly before a price is quoted.
Where to go next
Booking something in Ivybridge
Behind the survey
What people in Ivybridge are actually buying
CAA registered operator
Operator ID and Flyer ID both held and current with the Civil Aviation Authority, which is the baseline for flying commercially in UK airspace.
A2 Certificate of Competency
The A2 CofC, which allows closer flying to buildings and to people not involved in the flight than the basic qualification does. It does not extend to flying over crowds, and nothing on this site suggests it might.
DJI Mavic 4 Pro
A 100 megapixel Hasselblad camera and 6K video. Enough resolution that one flight can produce both a photograph fit to print and a frame close enough to read a hairline crack.
DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced
A 640 by 512 radiometric thermal camera for the jobs where the answer is a temperature difference rather than something visible: trapped moisture, heat leaving a building, a warm shape on cold ground.
Insured with Coverdrone
Full commercial cover, and the certificate goes to anyone who needs to see it before a visit. Managing agents and site managers usually do, and asking is sensible rather than awkward.
A construction background
The person flying has worked in construction, which is why the report says what a defect is and where it sits rather than only that something looks wrong in a photograph.
Fixed price, agreed first
The price is set before the visit and travel inside the coverage area is part of it. No hourly creep, no mileage added afterwards.
Written report within 48 hours
Where the job needs a report, it lands within 48 hours of the flight. Photograph-only jobs have their delivery date agreed at booking instead.
Nearby
Also covered around Ivybridge
- PlymouthA naval city of limestone ridges and post-war flat roofs, where commercial and managing agent work outweighs domestic enquiries by a wide margin.
- TotnesA steep medieval hill town on the Dart, where slate hanging, hidden valleys and party wall abutments make the roofs far more complicated than they look.
- KingsbridgeA steep estuary head town climbing hard from the quay, where slate hanging, dormers and turbulence around chimneys are the recurring subjects.
- TavistockA green stone Victorian town between Dartmoor and the Tamar, with tall stone stacks, steep sites and a mining heritage landscape around it.
See which one fits
Tell us what you need in Ivybridge
Send the address and what is worrying you. Sam Hembury will come back with a fixed price and the next slot that suits the weather.