Thermal imaging survey in Torquay

Torquay's grand Victorian and Edwardian villas and former hotels were built in an ornate Italianate style with rendered elevations and elaborate roofscapes, tall, complex and, in a large number of cases, since converted into flats. A converted villa carries the same wall-thickness thermal picture as any solid-wall Victorian building, but with the added complication that a single roof or a single elevation may now serve several separate flats, so a finding needs interpreting in the context of who owns which part of the building, much as in Teignmouth's seafront conversions.

Post-war estates fill out the town inland, and modern seafront apartments bring the newest construction standard to the waterfront itself, so as with several other larger towns on this site, the first useful question for a Torquay booking is simply which of these three building types the property belongs to.

Torquay is built across seven limestone hills around a sheltered harbour, so almost every street has a gradient and many properties sit on terraced or retained plots. The bay gives real shelter from the prevailing south-westerly, which is why the town grew as a resort in the first place, but easterly weather comes straight in unimpeded, and salt reaches the whole seafront regardless of which direction a storm arrives from.

The tall, complex Victorian roofscapes are actually hard to read from the ground or even from a standard photograph, hips, valleys, mansard sections and lead-lined parapet gutters all in close company, which is exactly the kind of roof geometry where a flown thermal pass earns its place over guesswork from street level.

For converted villas, flight planning takes account of the building's full roofscape even where only one flat within it is the subject of the enquiry, because a shared roof means a neighbour's heat loss can actually affect the reading over a shared party structure.

A dawn flight after a cold, clear night is the usual plan across the hillside stock, with the modern seafront apartments read to the same general standard as any other recent South West coastal construction.

Around Torre Abbey and the harbour, the grandest of the converted Victorian villas sit close together, sharing party walls and roofs in a way that makes a thermal reading on one flat actually relevant to its neighbours, while out towards Babbacombe and Oddicombe the housing thins out onto more exposed cliff-top ground with its own distinct wind pattern. Kents Cavern and the land around it mark a quieter, more residential stretch again, generally modern estate housing rather than the converted grand houses nearer the harbour, and a survey there follows the standard inland cavity approach.