Darned clever thiese smart phones you know.

[Jim K..]

White or magnolia.

[Brian Gaff]

We rent a small room in a sheltered accommodation block owned by our council for the Talking Newspaper. We are told to never let anyone into the building. However this bloke rolls up a couple of months ago, Hi, can I check your room for asbestos. I say well we have been here for 25 years and only five years ago we had a council person come in, climb into to the roof space and check we had none.

Mann says, I know nothing about that, I'm from (insert silly company name) and the council has contracted us to check out all the buildings in this estate. After a quick call to the counsel, they confirm he is on the level. So I let him in and what does he do? He points his camera phone at some points on the ceiling, looks at it for a moment and then says, no, there is no asbestos in here.

I though shall I ask how he knows what is in the roofspace, but thought better of it, so there you are this new technology is truly wonderful and can see through ceilings. Brian

[DerbyBorn]

Possibly a friend of a councillor who sold his service to the council.

[Nick Odell]

Can smartphones perform spectral analysis these days? Maybe it "sees" asbestos in the same way that a digital camera can "see" IR from a remote control.

Nick

[Tim Lamb]

Perhaps they were just looking for Artex and the camera was back up evidence for mk1 eyeball:-)

[DerbyBorn]

Good point!

[Archibald Tarquin Blenkinsopp]

Maybe when the house was constructed there were only two likely places to have asbestos installed, one being in the loft and the other being in ceiling panels.

It's concievable that one contractor might have overlooked the panels on the first visit if he were maybe looking for a specific item.

Not sure if the asbestos register contains the information, but it would be worth a look.

AB

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Isn't Artex just a generic term for a 'patterned' ceiling? Which could have been done at any time?

[Tim Streater]

Does all Artex contain asbestos?

[ARW]

No.

[ARW]

:-)

There is only one way to test for asbestos.

[Vir Campestris]

Bioassay?

[ARW]

Probably not:-)

Ever done an asbestos awareness course?

They are now done on line but when you went to an proper course with a proper person you could have fun.

Every proper course had the bloke doing the talk mentioning a head teacher that was killed by an asbestos board that she stuck drawing pins into.

Every proper course resulted in me asking "How do know that it was the asbestos from the drawing board that killed her and that it was not some other asbestos she played with as a child?"

And they all mentioned Steve McQueen.

[John Rumm]

No. There was a time though when it did.