Asbestos Ceiling Removal in Camberley
Look up in a Camberley home built around the Staff College and the heath, and the ceiling above you may hide textured artex or asbestos insulating board. We take it out cleanly while you carry on living there.
What hides in a Camberley ceiling
Camberley grew up around Sandhurst and the Staff College, and the housing followed the army out across the heath. There are Victorian and Edwardian villas near the centre, then street after street of 1930s, postwar and later semis and detached homes running through Yorktown, Old Dean, Frimley and Frimley Green. Most of it was finished long before asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999, and a lot of what hides the worst of it sits overhead, where nobody looks.
Two materials turn up again and again on ceilings here. The first is textured artex, the swirled or stippled coating brushed across ceilings and the odd wall from the 1960s through to the 1980s. The second is asbestos insulating board, AIB for short, which was fitted around boilers, inside airing cupboards and as plain ceiling boards in halls and on landings. Pipe lagging in the older villas sits close by, in the same airing cupboards and ceiling voids, so a ceiling job here can turn up more than one material at once.
You cannot tell either artex or AIB apart from a modern, asbestos free version by eye. The texture looks the same, the paint hides it, and a board that has been skimmed and decorated for forty years gives nothing away. That is why the ceiling is sampled before anyone lifts a scraper to it. We do not work off a hunch about the age of the house. We work off a lab result.
Artex and AIB are not the same risk
It matters which of the two you have, because they sit at opposite ends of the scale. Artex holds a low percentage of asbestos bound tightly into the coating, so it tends to be lower risk, and a coating that tests low can sometimes be classed as non licensed work. The fibre is locked in while the surface is sound and nobody is sanding or drilling it. Asbestos insulating board is the opposite. It is soft and friable, it holds a far higher proportion of fibre, and it lets that fibre go easily once it is cut, snapped or knocked. That puts AIB firmly in the higher risk, licensed category.
The difference is not academic. It decides how the whole job is set up and how long the room is out of use. A licensed AIB removal carries 14 days of written notice to the HSE before a single board comes down, a fully sealed enclosure, and four-stage clearance signed off at the end by an independent analyst who has no stake in the job passing. Artex that tests low risk can be handled without that full enclosure, though it is still removed under control, kept wet and never sanded or dry scraped.
The only honest way to know which path your ceiling takes is the sample. Graham, who runs the jobs, will not put a price or a method to a ceiling before the result is in, and no one else should either. Guessing high wastes your money on controls you may not need. Guessing low spreads fibre through a home that is still being lived in. Neither is acceptable, so we test first and plan second.
Working over your head in an occupied home
Most ceiling work in Camberley happens in a house that is still lived in. Nobody wants to move out over a coating on a landing or a board in the airing cupboard, so the job is built around staying put. We seal the room first, taping off doorways, sheeting the floor and covering any furniture that cannot be carried out, so the work stays inside one box and the rest of the home is left untouched.
Inside that sealed room we run commercial grade air filtration the entire time, pulling the air through fine filters so any loose fibre is caught rather than drifting under a door or up the stairs. For licensed AIB the enclosure is held under negative pressure, with at least eight to ten air changes an hour, so the air is always being drawn inward and nothing escapes past the seals. A unit like that runs from the moment the enclosure is built to the moment it comes down.
Scale helps put it in perspective. A 12 square metre ceiling, a fairly ordinary Camberley bedroom or landing, comes down in controlled sections and drops straight into sealed double bagging rather than being broken up loose. AIB boards lift out in their standard sheet sizes of roughly 1220mm by 2440mm, which is a large, awkward thing to handle without breaking it, so the work is slow and deliberate. The aim is simple. The dust stays where we put it, the bagged waste leaves the property properly wrapped, and the family barely notices the room is out of action.
Sampling, removal and the clearance air test
A ceiling job here runs in a set order, and the order does not change for the size of the room. First a small piece is cut from the suspect coating or board under controlled conditions and sent to a UKAS accredited laboratory, with results back in a few working days. If it comes back negative, that is the end of it and the cost stops there. If it comes back positive, we plan the strip out around the right risk level, whether that is a licensed enclosure for AIB or controlled removal for low risk artex.
When the work goes ahead, material is removed whole wherever it can be, bagged on the spot and taken to a licensed disposal site rather than a domestic skip on the drive. Nothing goes in the household bin and nothing is left for the homeowner to deal with. The room is then cleaned down before anyone thinks about taking the seals away.
The last step is the one that lets you walk back in. After a licensed removal an independent analyst runs the reassurance air test, checking that fibre in the air has dropped below the clearance figure of 0.01 fibres per millilitre of air. Only once the room passes that test is it signed off and handed back. Until then the seals stay up, no matter how keen everyone is to use the room again.
Clearaway is based over in Chessington at KT9, so for Camberley the team travels out to the western edge of the county and takes on everyday domestic ceilings alongside the larger residential and commercial work. We hold Spectra licence 142305706, we have been working across this area for more than seven years, and the ceiling above your head is exactly the kind of thing we are set up to deal with. To talk a ceiling through or book a sample, call 0800 024 6168.
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Why Choose Clearaway
Specialist Crew
Asbestos work is all we do, every day, across the South East.
Fully Licensed
Licensed asbestos removal contractor (Licence No. 142305706). Full public liability insurance on every job.
Local & Fast
Surrey-based. Most domestic jobs are booked in and finished within a week.
Our Own Team
We never subcontract. The people who quote your job are the people who do it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Our Removal Process
From first call to final certificate, every job follows the same clear four-step process.
Survey
We inspect the property and confirm the material. Sampling available if required.
Quote
Fixed written price covering removal, disposal and any replacement work.
Removal
Material is removed safely, double-wrapped and taken to a licensed disposal facility.
Certificate
You receive a waste consignment note and disposal certificate confirming legal handling.
Get in Touch
Send a few details about your project and we will come back the same working day with a fixed price. We cover Surrey, London and the South East, including Esher, Cobham, Kingston, Richmond, Epsom, Guildford, Woking and Croydon.