ProDave

Buy an old cheap touring caravan. It will have a chemical toilet, sink and hot water. It will provide all your "welfare" needs and some storage. You will need to take the toilet waste tank somewhere to empty it from time to time. Or hire a portaloo

It was -7 here last night and forecast to be even colder tomorrow. I have pretty much given up hope of getting my last velux window in now before the spring.

I thought I was going to read about a big hole to take a septic tank or treatment plant.

My very first house was tiny. Way too small in my opinion, BUT because it was small, and not in a nice area, it was cheap, it was in fact the cheapest house in the county when I bought it, and because of that, the only one I could just afford. It was small because the developers won their appeal. The local council had refused the application as over development. The developer won the appeal and the houses were built. Had the appeal been lost, they would have built fewer, larger houses which would have been more expensive and I might not have been able to afford a house for some time and things may have been very different for me.

But you REALLY need access to the roof space if you do that because it will go wrong one day.

This is where I would really want access into the loft. You need to make sure the vent pipe from the fan to the tile vent is a straight run, well supported. Any sags and those bits will fill with condensation and eventually block. It will be very hard indeed to be sure you have it right if you are doing "keyhole surgery" through a 4" fan hole.

Same as above. No cooker hood yet, mainly because we have not yet seen an island cooker hood that we like yet. The cable and fixing points are there for it. Our kitchen is part of the largest ground floor room, what is often called a "family room" by some people. So it has an MVHR inlet an one end and an mvhr extract at the kitchen end. I have just this weekend got around to balancing the mvhr system and made sure the inlet and outlet rates for that room are balanced. Like others cooking smells don't seem to spread, and I continue to delight in the good air quality throughout the whole house. Until you have lived in a house with mvhr, it is hard to understand just how well it works at keeping the house air nice and fresh.

The hardest thing will be doing a decent job of extending the vent pipe. Where does it vent to? With the sloping shoulders I guess it goes to a tile vent?

Mine is on two 60cm square slabs, the 50mm thick heavy ones. It weighs less than an oil fired boiler and I see plenty of outside oil boilers doing just fine on a couple of slabs. It sits on four anti vibration mounts. Drill carefully and fit a suitable rawl plug and you can fix the anti vibration feet to the slab. There is no specific condensation drain point on ours, it just drips condensation from various holes under the fan area. In this case it is not part of a path to walk on, and the condensate just disperses onto the ground.

The hole is the "air break"

Where is the fan now, wall or ceiling? If ceiling is it moving further or closer to the outside vent? Why can't you get above the ceiling? pictures?

That's the one. You can see where people get very large island worktops from. A good selection and we found one we like that they have 3 large slabs of at the moment. Are there any others in the area because I have not found them if there are?

But you do not want to be using a thermal store with an ASHP, you really want an unvented cylinder. In which case the water in the tank is your bath water. However we have discussed before that in a sealed tank, as long as the water entering is free from bacteria then there is no risk,. and the consensus was treated mains water was safe.

Have you done a "Grand Designs"?

We use speed 1 as the normal rate which seems fine and the air is always fresh. Speed 2 is now the "compliance speed" speed 3 we use as the kitchen boost when cooking, and speed 4 is the bathroom boost when showering,