Asbestos Ceiling Removal in Chertsey

Ceiling asbestos in Chertsey comes in two main forms, and they behave very differently. The first is textured artex, that swirled or stippled coating brushed onto ceilings and walls right across the interwar and postwar semis spreading out from the town centre, and on plenty of the Victorian and Edwardian terraces around Guildford Street and Windsor Street where a later owner skimmed over a tired ceiling. The second is asbestos insulating board, known as AIB. You find it around boilers, lining airing cupboards, and used as ceiling boards, and it turns up a fair bit in the larger Chertsey houses that were split into flats, where it went into the new partition and ceiling work the conversion needed.

The two are not the same risk. Artex holds its asbestos tightly in the coating, so it sits lower on the scale and some of it can be removed without a licence. AIB is the opposite. It is soft and crumbly, the fibres are loosely bound, and disturbing it releases far more into the air, which is why AIB work is licensed and held to the stricter standard. The problem is you cannot tell the two apart by eye. A stippled ceiling and an AIB board can look almost identical from below, so neither gets touched until a sample has gone to the laboratory and come back with an answer.

That is the whole point of dealing with a ceiling properly. The material is over your head, in the rooms you sleep and cook in. A ceiling that is flaking, water stained from an old leak, or about to be drilled for new downlights is exactly the kind of thing that puts fibres into the air you breathe. Age is the giveaway here. Asbestos was banned in the UK in 1999, and a good share of the Chertsey housing stock went up well before that, so the older the ceiling, the more reason there is to check it before any work starts rather than after.

Plenty of these jobs are in homes and flats where people are still living, so the work is built around keeping the rest of the house clean. The room is sealed off from the rest of the property with heavy sheeting, and a commercial-grade air filtration unit runs throughout to draw fibres away from the breathing zone and capture them on a filter. For licensed AIB work the enclosure is held under negative pressure, with the unit changing the air inside several times an hour, typically around eight to ten air changes, so nothing drifts out into the hallway or the room next door. Doors and any vents into the rest of the home are sealed before a board is touched.

A single ceiling is not a huge area. A normal Chertsey bedroom or kitchen ceiling runs somewhere around 9 to 14 square metres, and AIB boards came in standard sizes such as 1220mm by 2440mm, so a small ceiling might be only four or five boards. That keeps the work contained and quick. The material comes down whole wherever it can rather than being snapped up, which keeps fibre release low. It is then bagged, sealed and taken to a licensed disposal facility, and a single room can be cleared in a day.

What matters more than speed is what happens before anyone walks back in. On licensed work the room is not handed back on our say-so. An independent analyst carries out the four-stage clearance, which includes a thorough visual inspection and a reassurance air test, and the room only passes when the result is at or below 0.01 fibres per millilitre of air. That figure is the published clearance level for a room to be reoccupied, and until it is met the seal stays up and nobody goes in.