ProDave

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,

The purchase of the proper stone worktop for the kitchen is imminent. But the choice of suppliers locally seems limited. A quick internet search finds several websites, until you find they all lead to the same actual stone supplier. So we visited that one today and found a nice piece of granite in their yard and got a quote to do the kitchen worktop, upstand, a stone panel for the end of the units and a stone hearth for the stove to stand on, all from the same stone. It would be nice to find a second supplier to get a comparison with, but I can't find one. There was one other listed but they are not answering their phone and a search of where they should be did not find them, so I suspect they no longer exist. Any recommendations? The only comparison we have so far is a quote for Silistone, which is not very much cheaper and we would prefer the real stone for not a lot more.

Okay I have done some adjusting. The latest version of the spreadsheet is attached. I am now using the next fan speed up for trickle ventilation, and that, with recalculating the floor area (removing the room above the garage that is outside the mvhr envelope) the trickle rates now comply (with English regs at least) I will however be reverting to the slower fan speed for trickle ventilation and will check later how that complies with PH ventilation rates. I am now using the fastest fan speed for boost (which we actually use for bathroom boost) and the extract rates again pass English regs. I have done some adjusting to speed up the kitchen rates and slow down the bathroom rates. I would like to slow the utility rate a bit but that vent is now as closed as it will go. I have also slowed bedroom 3 which is much smaller and not used as a bedroom. I think that will do for now until I get some figures for Scotland. Willow_burn_Ventilation.xls

It's not a case of holding my nose. I AM English. At the end of the day I want to set it up to demonstrate compliance with building regs. Only nobody yet seems to know what that is in Scotland. No wonder nobody seems to be asked for any paperwork.

Patching a crack rarely works. you need to strip the render and re render a decent section of the wall. If anything for now patch it with a waterproof sealant, not cement. Photos of the cracks may help. Is it at the ends of the window? if so it's probably differential expansion of the lintel Vs the bricks / blocks.

Mine is very similar. The handle has a U shaped end with the two ends of the U fitting into the slot either side of the countersunk screw. Mine was this type https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/atplas-boudary-water-meter-box-2mm-telesscopic-more-than-ono-07712477650/153723441736?hash=item23caa19248:g:gK0AAOSwq~BdzDYx Contact him and see if he has a spare key?

Yes I have read all the linked documents. The link to a BRE one that says the trickle rate should be 0.5 ACH. That is about the only useful bit I have found. They refer to section 3 of that CIBSE standard. It does not have a section 3. And what is in sections 1 and 2 is way over my head. There might be something buried in there that tells me the ventilation rates required, but I could not find it.

That's what I have. But few ordinary ladders are long enough to be used as a roof ladder. See my picture in the above post. The "roof ladder" does not reach the bottom of the roof so I need another ladder to get up to the roof ladder. Only works if you have scaffold to work from.

I paid less than £2K for all my Kwikstage scaffold and I used a small amount of it to get up to the gable end to install my flue pipe The very top platform is about 7 metres above the ground.

Yes but this has stalled for now as nobody can tell me the SCOTTISH building regs minimum room extract rates for mvhr. It even stumped the duty building control officer that I spoke to on the phone yesterday, he has gone to find out. I will for now set it up to comply with English building regs and hope that is not too far out when the information on Scottish regs is eventually found.

Yes sorry @HerbJ , because your design was done by PaulScotland I put 2 and 2 together and made 5 and assumed it was to Scottish regs. If I get time I will try and balance my system and set it up to comply with the English regs, and then see how far out that is when I eventually find out what Scottish regs demand.

How small do you want? I think the most important thing is being room sealed. We bought a Mendip Stoves Churchill convection model with log store underneath. It was chosen for looks rather than anything else. It is rated at 4.5Kw. We did look at the little Springdale 3KW stove but SWMBO just thought it was so small it would look silly in a reasonably large room. One nice thing about the Mendip, is it takes both primary and secondary air from the external inlet duct. Some only take primary air from that and secondary air from the room so not truly room sealed. In spite of popular belief we don't "overheat" with the stove on. I think that is largely due to a fairly open layout with a good convection path to the stairwell and upstairs rooms (as long as you leave the door open) and the stove seems to run well at lower levels so less than it's 4.5KW rating a lot of the time. To choose the stove we simply visited all the retailers in the area to see what they had, and this one was being offered at a knocked down price as ex display and it ticked all the technical requirements, and SWMBO liked it. It is also the first stove I have had that truly keeps it's glass clear.