Roof leak detection in Exeter

Exeter carries an unusual spread of construction within a couple of miles. The Georgian streets around Southernhay and the cathedral quarter run slate behind parapets, with lead gutters hidden above the cornice line where a failure can run for months before it shows itself. Push out to Heavitree, St Thomas or Newtown and the roofs become tight Victorian terrace: natural slate, shared party walls, and a lead valley between the main roof and the rear addition on almost every house.

The outer ring is a different building again. Post-war estates at Wonford, Whipton and Beacon Heath sit under concrete interlocking tile on shallower pitches, and the newer development east towards Pinhoe and Cranbrook repeats the material with mechanically fixed dry ridge systems rather than mortar.

That spread matters for a trace specifically, because a leak on a Southernhay parapet gutter and a leak on a 1970s Whipton ridge behave nothing like each other on a thermal camera, and knowing which building is underneath before the flight starts changes where the time in the air goes.

Topsham, Exmouth, Crediton, Cullompton and Newton Abbot all sit within easy reach and all have their own page on this site, each written around that town's own roof age and style rather than a copy of Exeter's with the name swapped, because a hidden Georgian gutter and a moorland farmhouse fail in very different ways.

On the Georgian and Victorian stock the hidden lead valley behind a parapet is the recurring offender: it silts with grit and moss until water backs up under the slate rather than running off, and none of that is visible from the street. On the concrete tiled estates the more common fault is at the ridge and verge, where decades-old mortar bedding lets go and individual tiles start to rock, letting wind-driven rain track underneath rather than over the top.

Exeter sits in a valley and takes more rainfall than the England average, which means a wet patch under either kind of covering holds its dampness for longer than it would somewhere more exposed to drying wind, and that generally gives the thermal pass a clearer reading rather than a fainter one.

The EX1 to EX6 postcode area covers a lot of ground for one city, and the airspace check before any booking is confirmed is the same whether the address sits inside the flight restriction zone near the airport or well clear of it out towards Crediton.

A scaffold on a Heavitree terrace usually means a pavement licence, sometimes a partial road closure, and a conversation with the neighbours either side, days of disruption before anyone has established whether there is even a fault to fix. A trace needs a lawful launch point and roughly an hour, visual and thermal both.

In the conservation areas around the cathedral and the quayside it has a second advantage: nothing touches the building at all, which avoids the listed building consent conversation for a piece of work that is only ever meant to be a look. Addresses out towards Sowton and the Airport Business Park get their airspace checked properly before a date is agreed, because Exeter Airport's flight restriction zone sits close enough to matter.

The Quayside's converted warehouses, the University halls near Streatham, and the trading units at Marsh Barton each add a roof type the residential streets do not have: heavy old industrial spans reused as flats, large modern halls built within a few years of each other, and single-storey commercial sheds. Whichever of those a job turns out to be, the price is fixed once the address and the roof are known, and the visual and thermal images that come back meet the same standard whether the building is a Georgian terrace or a trading unit.