Drone chimney survey in Exeter

Exeter's older central quarters, the streets behind the Cathedral and down towards the Quayside, carry a dense run of Georgian and Victorian terraces, and terraces of that age were rarely built with a stack per house. A single tall brick stack often serves two or three flues from neighbouring properties, rising well above the ridge line to clear the roofscape around it, which is standard practice for the period but means the stack itself is taller, heavier and further from any ladder than a modern chimney would be.

The post-war semis on the outer ring and the newer development around Cranbrook and Pinhoe carry shorter, simpler stacks, usually a single flue in concrete tile or brick, and these fail less dramatically but no less often, particularly where a satellite dish or an aerial bracket has been fixed straight through the flaunching at some point over the decades.

Exeter is sheltered compared with the coast, but the city sits on a low ridge above the tidal Exe with the valley holding damp air for long stretches, and rainfall here already runs above the England average. A north-facing stack face dries slowly under those conditions, which means moss and lichen establish on the shaded brickwork readily and moisture sits in perished pointing for longer than it would on a more exposed, faster-drying site.

That slow-drying pattern is exactly the kind of thing a close photograph catches and a look from the pavement does not: a patch of dark, damp-holding brickwork on the north face of a stack can look identical to ordinary weathering from the ground, and only close resolution shows whether the joints underneath are actually still sound.

A tall shared stack over a terrace near the Cathedral or the Quayside is not somewhere a single ladder gets you a proper look, and scaffolding for what might turn out to be a five minute check is a disproportionate cost before anyone knows what is actually wrong. The narrow streets behind Exeter's older quarters also make access for a scaffold lorry its own separate problem, on top of the cost.

A flown survey covers the whole stack from a standoff distance a ladder cannot reach, close enough to read the flaunching and the pointing, without a lorry or a scaffold licence application before anyone has even confirmed there is a job worth doing.

Marsh Barton and the University of Exeter both sit outside the historic core this survey is really built around, and their stacks, where they carry one at all, are almost always modern and functional rather than part of the older terraced stock this town's copy has focused on. The buildings that actually need this survey sit closer to the Quayside and the streets around it.

Exeter also sits at the hub of this site's coverage: Topsham, Exmouth, Crediton, Cullompton and Newton Abbot are all within a short run of the city and all covered on their own pages, so a stack survey booked from Exeter can often be scheduled alongside a nearby job on the same trip, which helps keep the fixed price reasonable for everyone involved.