Outside the building: weather, soil, drainage and external analysis

Before you get to rooms, three steps record the property’s outdoor context — weather at the time of survey, ground conditions, and each external elevation.

What it is

Weather & Orientation records recent and current weather conditions at the property, auto-filled from an online lookup where you have a connection, with manual entry always available as a fallback. Soil & Drainage records ground type, drainage features and any visible external moisture indicators — likewise auto-filled where a lookup is available, manual otherwise. External Analysis is where you record each elevation of the property individually — findings, defects and photos per elevation, the same defect-checklist and photo pipeline used everywhere else in the wizard.

How to do it

1. Open Weather & Orientation and confirm the auto-filled conditions, or enter them manually if you’re offline or the lookup returned nothing.
2. Open Soil & Drainage the same way — confirm or complete the ground-condition fields.
3. Open External Analysis, add an elevation, and record its findings, ticking any defects from the checklist and adding photos where a hazard is present.
4. Repeat for each elevation that’s relevant to the survey.

How it integrates

Weather, soil and drainage feed the report’s own context sections and, for damp & mould surveys, sit alongside the room-by-room condensation analysis as part of the same overall picture — a leaking gutter or poor drainage recorded here is exactly the kind of external factor that room-level readings alone wouldn’t show. External elevation findings use the same defect checklist and photo-evidence pipeline as room findings, so your organisation’s Require photos for hazards policy applies to them too. Where a lookup can’t run offline, entering a value manually is recorded honestly as manually entered, not silently blocked.

Common problems

• The weather or soil lookup returned nothing. Enter the values manually and continue — a manual entry is never treated as a lesser record than an auto-filled one.
• I don’t see External Analysis at all. It’s included for the hazard types that need it; check with an admin if you expected it and it’s missing — see The wizard decides what you see in Running a survey, hazard by hazard.
• I’ve recorded the wrong elevation by mistake. Each elevation is its own entry — remove it and add a correctly labelled one rather than trying to relabel it in place.