Heritage House was Pete's brain child many years ago - the Heritage House logo features his house, and the enormous ancient yew tree that grows alongside. His irreverant rants on youtube, and wholehearted criticism of entrenched ideas and methods in the building and survey industry are well known. Years of running gold mining operations in remote mountains and deserts have left him with a healthy disregard for anyone or anything that isn't staight talking.
He's spent years bashing the timber and damp industry - and coined the well known phrases 'Damp Wally' and 'Wally Builder'.His campaign to rid the country of the damp industry has resulted in the RICS 'Moisture Investigation' methodology which he helped write in conjunction with some of the country's historic building luminati.. He's originally a geologist / geochemist - so beware anyone who dares talk about 'Rising Damp' without understanding the physics and chemistry of it! Pete wrote his best-selling book, The Warm Dry Home, which explains everything you need to know about dampness problems, and how to achieve a warm dry home.
Pete is passionate about using traditional building materials to create warm and dry homes - based on his experiences running a Building Conservation Building company for many years. Living in Shropshire, he is one of the leading specialists in Historic Timber Framed buildings in the country. The team frequently work with Listed and Historic timber framed buildings in Powys, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire and the surrounding areas. Pete is an expert in the Historic Hall Houses of the Welsh Marches - having found and surveyed Hall houses in Snowdonia, Powys, Monmouth, and mid Wales.
It's a dynamic partnership of experts, covering a multitude of skills relating to all things 'Old House'. We work as a team, sharing skill sets, constantly learning, researching and improving our knowledge in all things old house. We lead the field in working with historic timber framed houses - managing restoration projects on a number of significant Timber Framed manor houses. The crew know more about moisture and its effects on historic buildings than anyone else in the world.
Pete helped write the RICS Investigation of Moisture methodology, reviewed British Standard - BS 7913: Guide to Conservation of Historic Buildings - before it's publication, and is constantly researching and creating new ways to understand how old buildings react with their environment.
Due to the shambolic management of RICS, the Moisture Methodology has never been made mandatory knowledge for RICS surveyors, and is rarely used by their members. We receive a regular stream of incompetent and negligent RICS Level 2 and Level 3 surveys. It has become abundantly clear to us that RICS as an organisation is Not Fit For Purpose. Its entire professional standards board resigned recently, and prior to that its Chief Executive resigned. Some of our team are rics members, but most will not renew their membership.
Peter is adamant that the organisational failure of RICS to ban the use of damp meters, and its parallel failure to insist on the use of the Moisture Methodology as a mandatory standard, places them in the category of Not Fit For Purpose. You cannot survey so much as a dolls house without an overwhelming understanding of moisture, its cause, effect and measurement. The RICS standard equipment list insists that surveyors carry a damp meter. This alone makes every RICS survey automatically negligent. We do NOT endorse RICS, and want nothing to do with their incredibly poor standards of training. Peter has documented more of the reasons for the failure of RICS surveys in his book - The Warm Dry Home.
Our surveys are guided with thermal imaging, thermo hygrometers, drones, pole cams, gravimentric carbide test equipment, resistance drills, and more. We are Historic and Listed Building Surveyors. Some people prefer to describe us as Heritage Surveyors. We have a wide range of qualifications, including MRICS and MCIOB.
Science, not hearsay and belief systems is what drives our investigations and diagnoses.
