Drone chimney survey in Tiverton

Tiverton grew on the wool trade, and its Victorian mill workers' terraces are the defining stock this site's survey is built around here: long rows of narrow-fronted houses climbing the steep ground north and west of the town centre, each pair or group typically sharing a tall brick stack with several flues rather than one chimney per house. That shared arrangement means a single stack can carry the responsibility, and the fault history, of two or three neighbouring properties at once, which makes an accurate close record worth having before any repair conversation with a neighbour begins.

The medieval and Georgian centre around the castle carries older, individually built stacks, and the extensive post-war estates and the large modern development on the eastern edge of town carry plainer, more recent chimneys with none of the shared-flue complexity of the mill terraces.

The Exe valley through Tiverton is notably wet, well above the Devon average, and the town's steep sites put a lot of roofs, and the stacks on them, above the general roofline of their street, where wind loading is higher than a sheltered valley-floor position would give. On a tall shared mill terrace stack, that combination of prolonged wet weather and elevated wind exposure is a harder environment than most of the towns in this survey area see.

Getting scaffolding onto a steep mill terrace street in Tiverton is properly awkward, and because a stack here so often serves more than one property, agreeing who pays for what before anyone knows the actual condition is its own complication. A drone survey photographs the whole shared stack in one flight, close enough to show which flue's flaunching or pointing is actually at fault, without a scaffold tower on a narrow, steep pavement.

Tiverton Castle and the Grand Western Canal sit close to the medieval and Georgian centre, distinct from the steep mill terrace streets that carry most of the stock this page has focused on, and their stacks, where they exist at all on the more institutional buildings nearby, are generally simpler and less exposed than the tightly packed terraces on the hill. Knightshayes Court, further out, sits well away from the steep terraced streets entirely.

Cullompton, Crediton and Wellington are all close to Tiverton and all covered on their own pages, and a mill terrace survey here can sometimes be scheduled alongside a job in one of those neighbouring towns.

Stone slate on some of the older outlying buildings beyond the mill terraces is a heavier, more irregular covering than the clay plain tile common on the terraces themselves, and getting an accurate close read of a stack rising through stone slate benefits from the same standoff distance and resolution as the brick terrace stacks this page has focused on.

A shared mill terrace stack typically carries three, four or more pots along a single flaunching run rather than the one or two pots a normal semi-detached chimney would have, and checking every pot along that run individually, rather than sampling one or two, is standard practice on this kind of stack.