Drone inspection services in Chard

The industrial ground at Millfield and around the town carries the usual mix of manufacturing, distribution and trade units, and the town's lace-mill history has left larger older industrial buildings alongside them. It is a working town rather than a commuter one, and the buildings are used hard.

The older mill ranges bring the same issues found at Wellington and Tiverton: long spans, many valleys, glazing runs, and a century of piecemeal repair. The modern units are conventional, and the two are close enough together that a single visit covers both.

Hamstone-bedded ridges appear on the older buildings, and like the stone-bedded ridges further west they fail slowly and expensively, well above any position where somebody could reasonably inspect them.

This is the highest town in Somerset, sitting on a ridge above the Axe and Isle valleys with streams either side of the main street running to opposite coasts. That elevation leaves it exposed to wind from every quarter and it holds snow and frost noticeably longer than the lowland around it.

Snow load is worth a mention because almost nowhere else on this list needs it. On a shallow-pitch metal roof, snow that sits rather than sliding puts a sustained load on a structure and then melts unevenly, which drives water into laps and details under conditions they were not tested for. Drift against a parapet or a plant enclosure concentrates that load in exactly the wrong place.

Frost cycling does the rest. Any small defect in a seam or a sealant joint is worked at repeatedly through a winter here, and defects that would sit stable for years in Yeovil progress noticeably faster.

The most useful slot in this town is early spring, once the frost has finished and before the growing season starts. It catches what the winter did while the evidence is fresh, and it leaves the whole of the good weather available to get work done.

That is a different recommendation to the autumn slot that suits Exeter or Tiverton, and it is the reason a portfolio spread across the region does not want one blanket schedule applied to every site in it.

The town's position on the watershed also means its commercial buildings drain into two different catchments, which sounds like a curiosity and occasionally matters. Surface water arrangements on the older industrial sites here were built piecemeal, and where a roof discharges to a system nobody has records for, a blockage produces a flooding problem rather than a gutter problem. Photographing the roof drainage layout at the same time as the covering gives an owner something to work from when that question eventually arrives.