Thermal imaging survey in Teignmouth

Teignmouth's front is Georgian and Regency terrace, solid wall with the render and cornice detailing typical of a resort town of that era, and many of these buildings have been converted into flats over the years, which brings a specific complication: a converted flat often only owns part of a roof or a party floor, so a heat-loss finding needs to be read in the context of who actually controls that part of the building, not just what the camera shows. Victorian villas sit on the slopes behind, and post-war housing on the higher ground at Broadmeadow and towards Bishopsteignton road brings in the more familiar cavity picture found across most of this coverage area.

Flat roofs on seafront conversions are a specific and recurring building type here, added when many of the grand terraces were subdivided, and those flat sections are read with the same moisture-focused approach used on any flat roof elsewhere on this site, not folded into the general heat-loss picture of the solid wall below them.

Teignmouth is directly exposed to easterly gales driving up the Channel, which is actually unusual for a Devon coastal town, most of this coverage area is built and detailed around the prevailing south-westerly, and a building whose weak points were addressed with that assumption in mind can be caught out badly by weather coming from the other direction. Salt reaches the whole front, and the railway sea wall regularly overtops in bad weather, both of which keep the seafront terraces and their flat-roofed additions wetter for longer than a similar building on a south or west-facing coast.

That easterly exposure is worth mentioning to anyone booking a survey here who has read about South West coastal weather in general terms, because the usual assumptions about which elevation takes the worst of it do not hold in quite the same way in Teignmouth as they do a few miles down the coast.

Flight timing here pays close attention to the forecast wind direction specifically, not just its strength, given how differently this town behaves in an easterly compared with the more typical south-westerly pattern most of the network's coverage is planned around.

For the seafront flat roofs, an evening flight after a bright day gives the clearest read on trapped moisture, while the villas and post-war stock behind the front are better suited to a dawn flight after a cold, clear night.

Around the pier and the ferry crossing to Shaldon, the seafront terraces and their converted flats face the harbour side of the town, generally a little more sheltered from the direct easterly than the open stretch of front further along, though still exposed enough that the same flat-roof moisture questions apply. The Shaldon bridge crossing itself is a useful local landmark for splitting the town's more sheltered harbour-facing properties from the fully exposed seafront ones when planning which flight window suits a particular address best.