Thermal imaging survey in Saltash

Saltash's old waterfront quarter is terraced cottages on near-vertical streets, solid wall built for a working riverside population, with Victorian villas rising above it on the steeper slopes. The town's most extensive housing by volume is post-war, though, the estates at Burraton and Latchbrook and the more recent development on the Callington road, which brings the standard cavity-era questions of loft depth and fill condition into a town whose historic core is dominated by an entirely different, older construction type.

The gradient itself is worth noting for reasons beyond access: the steep drop from the town centre to the waterfront means the older cottage stock sits in a actually different wind exposure to the post-war estates on the flatter ground above, which is one of several reasons a Saltash survey is planned around where specifically in the town a property sits.

The Tamar funnels wind hard up and down the valley, and the town takes salt-laden air off the estuary as a matter of course. On the old waterfront cottages, that wind drives rain into a solid wall on the exposed river-facing elevations in a way that keeps them measurably damper, and therefore measurably worse at holding heat, than the same style of cottage on a sheltered street a few hundred metres back.

On the post-war estates, the wind exposure is generally gentler, set back from the immediate waterfront, and the more relevant question there is usually the era-specific cavity and loft standard rather than dampness from direct exposure, a actually different survey conversation to the one had about the waterfront quarter.

The steep waterfront streets are flown from a careful stand-off distance given the gradient and the proximity of the two bridges, with airspace around both checked as a matter of course before any date near the crossing is confirmed.

A dawn flight after a cold, still night suits the whole town, with the wind-exposed waterfront cottages and the more sheltered post-war estates both giving a useful reading in those conditions.

Saltash Passage and the old waterside quarter beneath the two bridges carry the steepest and most exposed of the town's historic cottages, built hard against the water with little to break the wind coming up the Tamar, while the post-war estates at Burraton sit further back and higher, actually more sheltered by comparison. That difference in exposure, not just in construction era, is why a Saltash survey is planned around exactly where a property sits relative to the water, since two houses built in the same decade can still show quite different dampness depending on how much shelter the gradient actually gives them.