Thermal imaging survey in Okehampton

Okehampton's town centre is built in granite and slate, a actually different thermal mass to the brick solid wall found in most of the other market towns on this list, granite holds and releases heat slowly and its thermal bridging pattern at reveals and junctions can look different on camera to a brick equivalent, which is worth knowing before a reading is compared against a brick town elsewhere on this site. Victorian terraces sit alongside it, a large stock of post-war housing fills out the town, and beyond the edge of Okehampton itself, scattered moorland farms and traditional longhouses carry construction that predates almost everything else in this coverage area, thick stone walls built for shelter rather than for heat retention in the modern sense.

A longhouse in particular is worth naming on its own: a building type designed to keep livestock and people under one long roof, often altered many times over centuries, where a thermal reading is as much a piece of local history as it is a building assessment.

Okehampton sits at the northern foot of Dartmoor where the East and West Okement meet, and the high moor forces Atlantic air upward right on the town's doorstep. That makes it one of the wettest and windiest towns in this whole coverage area, with driving rain frequent and roofs and walls staying wet for long periods, which is precisely the condition that most complicates a thermal reading: a actually wet stone wall or roof surface produces its own temperature pattern that has to be separated carefully from a pattern caused by a real insulation gap underneath.

For the moorland farms specifically, exposure is even more severe again than the town centre, and flights there are planned around a realistic dry window rather than the first available date, because a reading taken straight after rain on an exposed moor-edge building is unlikely to be trustworthy.

Given how often this area is actually wet or windy, timing is discussed in more detail here than for a typical booking, usually watching the forecast for a settled dry spell before confirming a date rather than working to a fixed diary slot.

Once a flight window is right, a dawn survey after a cold, clear night gives the sharpest possible reading across the granite town centre, the Victorian terraces and the outlying moorland stock alike.

Okehampton Castle and the ground around it sit close to some of the town's oldest granite stock, while the Meldon Viaduct corridor to the south west marks the edge of town before the moor takes over entirely, and the scattered farms beyond it take the very worst of the exposure this whole area is known for. A survey on a property near the viaduct or further out towards the moor is planned around a longer settled weather window than one nearer the town centre, simply because actually calm, dry conditions are rarer the closer a building sits to the open moor.