Drone services in Seaton

There is very little between the beach and the first rank of properties here, so salt spray and gale-driven rain are not occasional events but the defining maintenance condition. Fixings corrode, rendered parapets take a beating, and anything metal on an exposed elevation ages at a rate that surprises owners moving from inland.

The Victorian and Edwardian seafront terraces carry that load on complicated roofs with parapets and hidden gutters, where a failure fills and overflows inwards. As in every town built this way, the first sign is a stain on a top floor ceiling rather than anything you can see from the promenade.

Rendered elevations behind the parapets are the other recurring subject. Salt and driving rain get into render at a crack, freeze, and take a patch off, and the patch is always in the place hardest to see from the pavement.

Behind the front, the slopes carry a large stock of post-war bungalows, and shallow pitches shed water poorly once wind pressure gets under the covering. Water is driven back up under a tile in conditions where a steeper roof would be perfectly fine.

Flat felt and single-ply on bungalow extensions is the other half of that. Ponding, a splitting seam, a silted outlet: none of it is visible from the garden and all of it is obvious from above.

Holiday flats and chalets add a third category, often owned at a distance and inspected by nobody between seasons, which is exactly the pattern that lets a small problem become a large one.

Conservatories and glazed extensions are common on the bungalow stock too, and the junction between a conservatory roof and the house wall is one of the more reliable sources of water ingress anywhere in the country.

East of the town the Axe estuary and its marshes are a wetland reserve, and to the west sits the Undercliff landslip woodland. Both put constraints on where an aircraft can sensibly work, and both are planned around rather than argued with.

The tramway and the estuary also generate a certain amount of picture work, particularly from hospitality and holiday businesses that trade on the setting and cannot show it from ground level.

This stretch takes damage in most winters, and the enquiries arrive in clusters within a few days of a named storm. What helps an insurer is a dated record of the damage while it is fresh, close enough to show the failure and wide enough to place it on the building.

The temptation is to wait for a nice day. It is usually the wrong call, because the value of the evidence falls as the weeks pass and a plain photograph taken promptly outweighs a beautiful one taken late.

There is a quieter version of the same job worth mentioning: a survey before the winter rather than after it. Establishing that ridge fixings and flashings are sound in October is a great deal cheaper than establishing in February that they were not.