Balcaskie Estate – Roof Inspection with Structural Engineer
We were tasked with carrying out a roof inspection at Balcaskie estate house, the roof structure was made up of steep pitched slated sections, hidden gutters, flat lead roll areas, 2 slate turrets, lead valleys and hips as well as 16 sandstone chimney stacks, Rhone’s and downpipes. Along with 2 buildings of each wing from the main house and the servants quarters building.
The clients were looking for a general report of the existing roof conditions for all of the above mentioned items, for this survey we deployed one of our enterprise drones with zoom capabilities, allowing us to record footage from a safe distance. Our enterprise drone is equipped with tripod mode allowing us to manoeuvre slowly around the structures to record sharp, in focus footage. Along with zoom capabilities, we can attach a high powered search light which is essential in low light conditions. We collected many still photos and various videos of the roof structure on all of the buildings, we then added these to our report, each chimney stack received and each roof section received a unique letter for easier identification within the report.
We brought onboard our local structural engineer to assess the conditions of the roof and chimney stacks, they were delighted to see that we had captured all areas of the roofs with the drone, their first thoughts were, how are we going to be able to access the varying sections of the roof without the use of a mobile high reach cherry picker or multiple sections of scaffolding. We were pleased to hear back from the structural engineers that the footage was perfect for them to produce their site specific report to present to the client. The structural engineers provided a full report on which chimney stacks required attention and which particular stones within the stacks that needed to be repaired or replaced.
From the structural report, our clients were then able to discuss plans to carry out the works with their stonemason and plan ahead on how the buildings would be scaffolded, walkways, cranes etc to carry out the works safely and efficiently.
Whilst on site we captured some aerial shots of the estate and house for the client for private use only.
With respect to our client’s wishes we won’t be publishing any footage from this survey
