Asbestos Surveys in Chessington, KT9
Chessington is our home base in KT9, so a survey here starts with knowing the local stock. Most of it is 1930s and postwar semis off the Leatherhead Road, built before asbestos was banned in 1999.
Why a Chessington home needs surveying
A survey is about finding asbestos and assessing it, not pulling it out. Before you can plan any work, or buy a house, or rent one out, you need to know what is in the building and how bad it is. That is the job a survey does. It puts a record on paper instead of a hunch in your head. We work out of KT9, so Chessington is the patch we know first-hand, from the older cottages through to the postwar semis and the newer estates around Hook and Chessington South.
The reason it matters here is the age of the housing. The bulk of Chessington went up as London spread out along the Leatherhead Road and the A243, all of it long before the 1999 ban, and the materials of that era are still sitting in these homes today. Corrugated cement on the garage and shed roofs. Textured artex on ceilings and walls. Asbestos insulating board around the boiler and in the airing cupboard. Vinyl and thermoplastic floor tiles laid over black bitumen. Pipe lagging in the older properties, and cement soffits, gutters and fascia boards on the semis. None of it can be told apart from the safe modern equivalents by eye, which is exactly why a survey is worth doing rather than guessing.
Because we are based right here, a survey in Chessington is the opposite of a long-distance job. It is booked for the same week as a matter of course, not slotted in around travel from the other side of the county. Graham, who owns the firm, quotes and runs the local jobs himself, so the person who walks your house is the person who already knows this housing stock and these streets.
The two survey types explained
There are two kinds, and which one you need comes down to what you are about to do with the property. A management survey is for a home that is staying lived in. It checks the materials on view and in the spots they tend to hide, records the condition of each one, and tells you what to leave well alone and what to keep an eye on over time. Nothing gets opened up or pulled apart. It is the everyday survey for a family that simply wants to know where they stand in their own house, or for a landlord who has to show the place was checked.
The second is a refurbishment and demolition survey, and that is the one you want before building work. If a wall is coming down, a kitchen is being torn out, or an extension is going on the back of one of the interwar semis, this survey goes a good deal further and looks into the parts of the structure the work is going to disturb. It is the more involved of the two because the builder has to know what they will hit before the first tool goes in, not halfway through the job when it is already too late and the dust is in the air.
Most survey visits to an average three-bed Chessington semi take a couple of hours on site, a little longer for a bigger property or one that has been heavily converted over the years. The visit itself is the quick part of the process. The real value sits in the report that comes back afterwards, which is where the next section picks up.
Samples, the lab and the written report
Anything suspect gets sampled. A small piece is taken under controlled conditions and sent to a UKAS-accredited laboratory for testing, and a home survey collects somewhere around six to ten samples across the rooms and outbuildings, with more in a larger or older house that has had bits added on over the decades. Results come back within a few working days. We do not read a material from the look of it, because the look of a material is exactly how people get this wrong, and a wrong call on asbestos is not the kind of mistake you want to find out about later.
What you end up holding is a written report. It lists every material that was checked, says whether each one holds asbestos, scores the risk it carries, and marks where it sits in the building. That document is the thing you hand to a builder so they can price and plan the job without nasty surprises. It is what a solicitor will want to see in a sale, and what a buyer reads before they commit to a Chessington property. For a landlord it is the paper record that shows the home was looked at properly by someone who knew what they were doing.
A survey is the assessment step, and it stops at finding, testing and reporting. It does not include taking anything out. If the report turns up a material that has to be removed, that is a separate piece of work with its own controls, and the report is what tells us how to approach it. That is where the final section comes in.
What the report leads to
Plenty of Chessington reports come back clean, or with materials that are perfectly fine left where they are and simply noted to keep an eye on. That is a result worth having on its own, because it means you can get on with a sale or a refit knowing the building has been checked. Where something does need removing, the report tells us exactly what we are dealing with, and the route from there depends on the material itself.
A good deal of domestic asbestos work is non-licensed and can be taken out without the full apparatus, in a single visit, with the area contained and air tested before anyone returns to the room. Higher-risk material is a different matter. That falls under licensed work, which carries a stricter standard: 14 days of notice to the HSE before anyone so much as starts, a fully sealed enclosure built around the work, and four-stage clearance testing signed off by an independent analyst at the end before the space is handed back. The survey is the thing that tells you which side of that line your particular house sits on, so you are not guessing at the cost or the disruption before you begin.
We have spent more than seven years working across Chessington and the streets around it, from Hook and Malden Rushett through to Tolworth and Surbiton, so the housing described in any report we write is housing we already know inside out. Our licence with Spectra is number 142305706. If you are buying, selling, renting out, or about to start building work on a home in KT9 and you want a survey booked in, call us on 0800 024 6168.
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View this project"Graham and his guys picked up some asbestos roof sheets from my property in Chessington. Would highly recommend this company to anyone. Really good service and very professional. Thank you"
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.
Why Choose Clearaway
On Our Home Patch
We work out of Chessington, right on the edge of the KT postcodes, so a same-week survey here is the norm, not the exception.
The Owner On The Job
On local work Graham quotes and runs the job himself. You deal with the person doing the work from first call to final certificate.
Fully Licensed
Licensed asbestos removal contractor (Licence No. 142305706). Full public liability insurance on every job.
Our Own Team
We never subcontract. The people who quote your job are the people who do it.
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.