Aldermoor & Vane · chimney surveyors · Wychwood Vale & the Hollows · Est. 1991
The chimney, read like a deed.
We survey flues — Level 2 camera scans and Level 3 structural openings to NFPA 211 — and write reports a solicitor can file. No sweeps, no repairs, nothing to sell you but the reading: the brick as it is, the liner as it stands, and the price the truth asks of either.
Level 1 · 2 · 3 to NFPA 211 · typed reports in forty-eight hours · nothing to sell but the reading — Est. 1991
The practice
A surveyor with no van to unload
Every chimney firm in the vale inspects with one eye on the repair it might sell. Aldermoor & Vane inspect with neither: the practice owns rods and cameras and no tools of any other kind, takes no commission from anyone who does own them, and has told four thousand households the flue they feared was fine. The reading is the product — which is why the reading is worth paying for.
Services & rates
The fee schedule
The schedule every client sees before the first visit, and the invoice repeats it. We take no percentage of any repair the report recommends — the fee is the whole relationship, which is why both solicitors and the firms we sometimes end up contradicting keep our number.
Level 1 visual inspection$129
The annual look — no tools beyond lamp and mirror, written summary
Level 2 camera survey$349
Every foot of flue on video, defect register with measurements, sale-ready report
Level 3 structural openingfrom $900
Masonry opened to reach what even the camera cannot — scoped only from Level 2 footage, reinstated after
Pre-purchase flue reading$349
The Level 2 survey with the report framed for negotiation, before you commit
Insurance & litigation reportfrom $450
Documented condition for claims, disputes and listed-building consents
Post-repair verification$180
A re-scan after any contractor’s work, issued as a signed addendum
How it goes
A commission, start to filed
The same sequence on every job — the only variable is your project.
Day 1
The camera
Drop sheets hearth to hatch, then the flue read end to end on video — damper plate, smoke chamber, shelf and termination each by name, every defect measured while the monitor shows you what the surveyor sees.
Day 1, later
The roof and the firebox
Crown, flashings, joint condition and the firebox brick photographed from both ends of the chimney. A flue is a system read from three positions; one-position surveys are how defects get surnames like “suddenly”.
Within 48 hr
The report
Typed: the defect register with time-stamped stills, the readings, the NFPA 211 classification, and a plain-English page your solicitor can file and your builder can price. Video archive kept seven years.
If needed
The Level 3 opening
Where footage says the trouble hides behind masonry, a scoped opening — quoted from the Level 2 register, reinstated to match, and photographed at every stage so the record stays unbroken.
Nothing to sell but the reading
The practice owns no brushes for hire, no liners in stock and no commission arrangements with anyone who does. If the report says the flue is sound, nobody at Aldermoor & Vane profits from it being otherwise — a sentence very few chimney documents can carry honestly.
The conflict, removed
Why the separation matters
A firm that surveys and repairs is marking its own homework, and the vale has the reline invoices to prove it. When the reading is all we sell, a sound flue is our best product — and a condemned one comes with the footage, the measurements and the price of a second opinion on us.
Wychwood Vale & the Hollows, 2025 — 2026
Recent surveys
Six commissions from the season’s book — sales, disputes and one wedding-list surprise. The stills are the clients’; the archive keeps the rest.
The practice book, since 1991
Filed figures
Thirty-four years of readings, including the ones that found nothing — the sound flue is the finding we file most and value highest.
The vendors’ agent arrived armed with a contractor’s report calling for a full reline at Vale Grange — convenient, since the contractor was the agent’s brother-in-law. Aldermoor & Vane scanned it in an afternoon and the typed reading found sound clay save one cracked tile at the thimble, measured to the millimetre, with time-stamped stills. The price of the house moved by rather more than the survey fee. Our solicitor now circulates their schedule to every client buying an older place in the vale.
Level 3 sounded like surgery and priced like it too. Their register from the Level 2 footage showed exactly one metre of wall worth opening — the opening was scoped to it, reinstated to match, and the addendum photographs read like a museum label. The chimney has a biography now.
We had two contractors contradicting each other about our smoke chamber and a listed-building officer wanting documentation for everything. The survey gave both of them what they needed and neither of them a customer. The parging quote it scoped came in twenty percent under either guess.
The post-repair verification was the sharp part — the reline crew knew a signed addendum was coming, and the workmanship looked accordingly like the drawings. Worth the $180 twice over; I have kept the addendum with the deeds.
Before you write
Commission questions
The five the practice answers by letter and by line. Anything more particular, the study answers within the day.
Level 1, 2 or 3 — what is the difference in your hands?
Level 1 is the annual look with lamp and mirror. Level 2 is the camera survey — the NFPA 211 requirement at any sale, fuel change or after a flue fire, and the basis of every report we file. Level 3 opens masonry to reach what the camera cannot, and we scope it strictly from what Level 2 measured — never as a first resort.
Can you survey a chimney you cannot inspect from the roof?
Yes — the camera works from below, the termination is read by pole camera from the ground, and the report says plainly which findings are certain and which carry a stated confidence. What we will not do is let a ladder-shy chimney produce a ladder-shy report.
Your report says the flue is sound. The sweep says otherwise. Now what?
Send them the video archive reference — both readings are on film, time-stamped, kept seven years. We will attend a joint visit with any contractor, camera running, at the schedule’s hourly rate; in thirty-four years the footage has lost that argument precisely once, and we framed the lesson.
Do you survey for insurance claims?
Frequently — after flue fires, lightning, frost heave and the occasional vehicular chimney. The register is written for loss adjusters: cause where determinable, extent measured, remedial scope priced neutrally. We appear as an expert witness when asked, and the archive makes the stand a formality.
Why no repairs, honestly?
Because a reading you can act on is only worth what its independence costs. The day we own a reline rig is the day our sound-flue reports need an asterisk. The vale has firms that fix chimneys well; it has exactly one that only reads them, and the division is the practice.
Commissions booked within the fortnight; urgent sale surveys inside the week · (555) 051-8793 · study@aldermoorvane.example
Commission the reading
Tell us the house, the era, and what is being asked of the chimney — a sale, a claim, a dispute, or nothing more than peace of mind. The Level 2 survey is $349 with the typed report in forty-eight hours and the archive kept seven years. study@aldermoorvane.example