Management
The Heritage House brand is owned and managed by Pete Ward. It started as a small building company, and grew to a mid sized construction company that specialised in working with old properties. At one point Pete had a team of around 15 craftsmen working on timber frames, and stone manor houses around the country. As time went by he spent more and more time surveying old buildings, and the construction side of the business was gradually reduced. Pete started to ask questions of the Damp industry – and their obvious association with RICS. His long and successful battle against the ‘Damp Wally’ still goes on today. Damp Wally is now a household name, with RICS Wally not far behind. It is sad to see the importance placed on ‘Qualifications’ at the expense of practical experience.
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 originally a geologist / geochemist – so beware anyone who dares talk about ‘Rising Damp’ without understanding the physics and chemistry of it! Two years ago, Pete gathered his knowledge of moisture in old buildings and wrote The Warm Dry Home book – which has now sold over 20,000 copies and helped countless home owners and tenants understand their environment. It’s become the bible for anyone wanting to prevent damp problems in their home environment.
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.
The survey business carries on under the Heritage House Group banner – ably managed by Lucy Wilkins. Pete still does surveys, but most are done by the amazing team of experts we work with.
Technology
Our surveys are guided with thermal imaging, thermo hygrometers, drones, pole cams, gravimentric carbide test equipment, resistance drills, and more. This ensures that clients can understand exactly why rising damp doesnt exist, and can see condensation and damp issues as they should be seen.
The Company
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 any other surveyors.
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 thorough scientific 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.
We have a wide range of qualifications, including MRICS (historic membership) and MCIOB.
Science, not hearsay and belief systems is what drives our investigations and diagnoses.