Thermal imaging survey in Cullompton

Cullompton's medieval and Georgian core along Fore Street includes genuine cob construction in the older lanes, thick solid earth walls with a completely different thermal behaviour to brick or stone, holding and releasing heat slowly and needing breathable materials if they are ever insulated at all. It is a small part of the town by volume next to the large amount of late twentieth century estate housing and the continuing new-build expansion that dominates Cullompton's more recent growth, which brings the same questions any modern South West cavity or timber-frame estate carries, mostly around workmanship gaps rather than absent material.

That contrast, a actually old cob core against a large and growing modern estate, means a thermal survey booking here benefits from knowing early which category a property falls into, because the likely finding and the right time to fly are different for each.

The town sits on flat ground in the Culm valley beside the motorway corridor, and that valley floor location means it holds damp and frost more than the surrounding higher ground. Thatch and shaded slate both stay wet for longer here than they would on a hillside a mile away, and for the cob buildings specifically, a valley floor that keeps the ground and the base of the wall damp is a genuine risk to how well that wall can hold heat, since a wet cob wall performs markedly worse than a dry one.

For the newer estate stock, the valley floor is less consequential thermally and the more relevant factor is simply the construction standard in force when each phase was built, which changed meaningfully across the decades this town has been expanding.

A dawn flight after a cold, still night works particularly well here because the valley floor's tendency to hold frost gives an unusually wide overnight temperature swing to read against, sharper than a more open, breezier site would produce.

For cob properties, the survey is planned with extra care around recent rainfall, since a wet cob wall's thermal reading needs to be interpreted very differently from a dry one, and the report says plainly where that caveat applies.

The Walronds, a substantial period house near the centre, sits among the town's oldest and most solid-wall stock, while the M5 junction 28 corridor to the east has drawn newer commercial and some residential development that shares little in construction terms with the medieval lanes a short distance away. For a town expanding as actively as Cullompton, that spread between the historic centre and the motorway-adjacent newer building is wide enough that a survey booking benefits from naming roughly where in the town a property sits, since the construction era, and the likely finding, differ sharply across that distance.