Building and asset management costs are considerable. Importantly the costs associated with repairing or replacing assets that have been damaged due to a lack of preventive maintenance are even greater.
The cost of corrective repairs can often be significantly higher than what it would have cost for preventative maintenance. This means businesses can spend far more money on the ‘cure’ rather monitoring and identifying areas of risk earlier on.
How Much Does 'Prevention' Cost?
One demonstration of prevention rather than cure that could have made significant savings relate to a church in London. We offered to inspect the roof, tower and steeple using accurate drone inspection techniques. Our quote was less than £1000. The inspection involved taking 300 high resolution images in the space of a day capturing every single aspect of the building. Desk based analysis after the drone capture revealed that:
- There was significant water pooling around the tower, at least 2ft deep (most likely caused by blocked gutters from leaf or other debris) and
- Key ridge tiles were missing, not visible from the ground, risking water incursion
The report advised on measures to fix these issues provided by our partners in roofing and guttering. They used our report to inform their quote basis.
Actions taken next included the gutters in the tower being cleared costing around £1000 and replacing critical ridge tiles. Above all our partners estimated that if the damage to the building was not acted upon it could cost in the region of £30,000-£40,000 for repairs and clean up.
This is not an isolated case, we have inspected commercial buildings, accommodation blocks and other building assets. In almost all cases identifying risks or concerns and implementing minor repairs before they become major faults saved our customers £’000s.
A Programme of drone building inspections
Buildings can be inspected once, twice or many times per year and due to technologies available., Importantly works can be more highly targeted, reducing the need to scaffold the whole building.
Images captured are high definition, allowing acute levels of fault identification. In addition
accuracies of 1-5cm can be achieved if planned into the drone operation. Meaning that measurements can be made from the drone data. This is achieved via a combination of high accuracy drone sensors, positioning software and a skilled team.
For larger projects the drone inspection data can be fed centrally into a Project Management tool, This allows the manager to allocate specific works to teams e.g. concrete specialists, structural engineers, painters, roofers. A highly efficient means of managing larger assets from office blocks to dams at a fraction of the traditional costs.
In Summary
Building management & infrastructure management is a complex task. Therefore any cost reductions, efficiencies and risk reductions associated with managing these assets are critical.
Drone building and asset management inspections are an effective method to obtain accurate data quickly and efficiently. This data can then be used to inform management decisions on cost and risk reduction, ensuring that potential issues are identified.
It may be a leap of faith to initially to test out a new method of asset management. However it is a given that the cost of ‘Cure’ rather than ‘Prevention’ it is worth considering.
Mark Elliott – MD, S4G Drone Services.
