Thermal imaging survey in Seaton

Seaton carries an unusually large stock of post-war bungalows on the slopes behind the seafront, low, shallow-pitched roofs with a smaller loft void than a Victorian house and, on many of the older ones, insulation that was fitted to a standard nobody would specify today. Because a bungalow's roof covers most of the building's footprint, a thin or patchy loft here has a disproportionate effect on the whole property's heat loss compared with the same gap in a two-storey terrace.

The seafront itself is Victorian and Edwardian terrace, solid wall behind a shingle beach only a few metres away, plus a scatter of holiday flats and chalets that were often built or converted quickly and cheaply, which is its own thermal question: a chalet roof or a flat conversion ceiling is frequently under-insulated in a way that was never properly documented when the work was done.

Seaton is directly exposed to the south with the beach only a few metres from the front row of properties, and salt spray combined with gale-driven rain is the defining weather problem here. Shallow bungalow pitches shed wind-driven rain poorly compared with a steeper Victorian roof, so moisture sits and works into roof penetrations and eaves details for longer, which both damages the building and undermines whatever insulation is packed into that shallow void.

Colyford and the modern estates towards it are a more conventional, better-sheltered inland picture, and a thermal survey there is closer in character to any modern South West cavity estate than to the exposed bungalow stock nearer the front.

For the bungalow stock, a whole-roof thermal pass is usually the more useful survey than a single-room targeted one, because the roof void is small enough that a gap in one area is likely to be part of a wider pattern rather than an isolated problem.

A dawn flight after a cold, clear night works well across the whole town, with the exposed seafront and bungalow slopes checked first while the temperature difference from overnight is still at its widest.

The Seaton Tramway corridor, running up the Axe valley towards Colyford, roughly marks the line between the older bungalow stock nearer the seafront and the more recent estates further inland, and that line is a useful rough guide when booking a survey, since the construction era and therefore the likely finding changes noticeably either side of it. Along the Axe Estuary Wetlands to the east, the last few streets of housing share the same low-lying, salt-exposed position as the seafront itself, and those properties are flown with the same care around tide and weather as the front row on the beach.