Thermal imaging survey in Dawlish

Dawlish's most extensive housing stock by volume is post-war bungalow development on the cliff tops, low, shallow-pitched roofs covering most of a small footprint, built in real numbers rather than as isolated examples. As at Seaton, that construction type means a loft insulation gap has a disproportionate effect on the whole building, because there is comparatively little wall area and comparatively a lot of roof relative to the size of the house.

Regency and Victorian terraces around The Lawn and Dawlish Water form an older, solid-wall core, seafront hotels and apartment blocks bring flat-roofed sections into the mix along the front, and modern estates inland at Dawlish Warren carry the newest construction standard, so the town spans nearly as wide a construction range as Newton Abbot or Plymouth despite its smaller size.

Dawlish sits among the most storm-exposed places on the South Devon coast, with south-easterly gales throwing sea water directly over the railway wall and the cliff-top bungalow estates taking unbroken wind with nothing to slow it down before it arrives. That level of exposure means the cliff-top bungalows are simultaneously the town's most heat-loss-prone building type, by roof-to-wall ratio, and its most weather-battered, which is exactly the combination that makes a genuine thermal reading valuable rather than academic here.

For the seafront hotels and apartment blocks, the same storm exposure is primarily a flat-roof moisture question, wind-driven rain finding weaknesses at parapets and rooflights that a calmer coastal town would rarely test to the same degree.

Given how frequently this stretch of coast sees actually severe weather, flight timing here is planned around a settled window rather than a fixed date, watching the forecast for a calm enough spell to fly safely and to get a reading uncomplicated by very recent storm damage.

Once conditions allow, a dawn flight after a cold, clear night suits the bungalow stock and inland terraces, while an evening flight after a bright day is the better choice for the seafront flat-roofed sections.

Dawlish Warren, at the town's northern edge, is both a nature reserve and the location of some of the more recent housing development inland, a actually different construction generation to the storm-battered cliff-top bungalows a short distance south, and a useful marker for the point where the town's exposure noticeably eases. A survey on a Warren-side property is planned to the standard modern cavity rule, while anything nearer the sea wall and the cliff top follows the storm-window planning described above, and naming which side of that line a property sits on speeds up the booking considerably.