James – Page 7 – Sennicotts House & Gardens

Campaign to give a tax break for domestic PAYE employers.

October 12, 2009 No Comments

Before I go any further I need to acknowledge that this is not an issue facing the majority of the population. However if addressed, I believe it could bring benefits to the wider society.

Painting as part of the maintenance on a Listed Building. — Listed Buildings need labour intensive care.

This concerns the issue of private individuals becoming employers to help them in private affairs and in particular maintaining privately owned Listed Buildings.

Currently the owner of the Listed building or garden earns income on which they pay Income Tax at various rates. If they choose to employ someone to help maintain the building or garden (domestic staff) they then have to pay those employees out of net income (that is left after tax has been paid), and then undertake the same Pay As You Earn administration (collecting the income tax from that employee and paying the employers share of the National Insurance) as would any other employer.

Here’s the issue: any employer running a business is able to set their employment costs against their income to reduce their tax, so why can’t owners of Listed Buildings or for that matter employers of domestic staff (nannies etc), whose employees are paid through the PAYE scheme get some sort of tax relief on their income for doing so.

It would be easy to administer because HMRC has records of both the employers and employees tax affairs. It should only work where employees are paid through PAYE. There are loads of benefits:

This would encourage employment by making it more affordable for private individuals to employ staff in domestic, childcare, gardening, and property maintenance jobs.
It would encourage employers to pay staff currently paid cash in hand into the PAYE system and probably increase tax revenues.
It would be easy to administer as HMRC has all the records it needs to cross check claims by private employers.
By encouraging individuals to employ domestic staff it would free up their time and encourage them to spend in the local economy.
Owners of our heritage would be able to employ sufficient help to make it possible and desirable to open their properties/gardens on an occasional basis to the public.
With more manpower employed in upkeep our heritage stock would be kept in a better state of repair.

There is a reason for mentioning the listed building element. Presumably the main case against such tax relief is that it lines the pockets of the already wealthy and is an unfair tax break. The Listed Building element addresses this. Owners of Listed Buildings provide a service of national benefit by maintaining the Nation’s Cultural Heritage. While they often get the benefit of living in attractive properties they are essentially unpaid private guardians, restricted in what they can do to reduce the costly maintenance of their properties because as a Nation we want them to preserve our past. As they get little or no financial assistance for this role and their properties usually require the most labour intensive form of upkeep it would appear not that unfair to assist them in the labour element of looking after our heritage.

And this is the shift in thinking proposed. To see this role in the same light as small businesses. To see the owners of these Listed Buildings as operating in the business of maintaining our heritage. So just as every other business in the country gets a tax break for encouraging employment and employing individuals to help it go about its business, then these private individuals should be given similar treatment and some form of reduction in their income tax liability where that income is going towards the employment of individuals to assist them in the maintenance of our Heritage.

Your comments would be appreciated in this debate.

James

A little trip to Spain

September 28, 2009 No Comments

So it was totally over indulgent and there are lots of sensible reasons why one shouldn’t have gone but from the moment Mr Arengo-Jones left the message on my phone I knew it wasn’t an opportunity you miss.

The next thing we knew there was a surreal moment of the four of us meeting at Heathrow and heading to Barcelona for a meal at El Bulli. The levels of expectation and excitment could only have meant we would be dissapointed by at least some of the 35 courses, or the atmosphere or the service, or something. So it is with some astonishment that I can say that every course exceeded almost anything I can remember ever eating.

The most usual question is, “what was on the menu?” Yet that is the wrong question because whatever the course was called the description doesn’t even begin to take you close to the experience. I have attached the menu here but I can guarantee it doesn’t tell you much. Which is why I put together this short video. It doesn’t describe the food because the words again are not sufficient but it gives you an idea of the atmosphere. As Olly said beforehand, “fizzing!”, and an experience not to be missed … whatever it takes

James

Evinrude eTec outboard corrosion problems

September 25, 2009 No Comments

Evinrude eTec 200 — The engine runs well

Has anyone else had an ongoing corrosion problem with Evinrude eTec engines?

The corrosion occurs on the mid section of the leg causing the paint to blister and flake off.

We have had this problem repaired twice already and in a matter of months the problem is back. The second repair involved the paint being properly baked on but still the problem returned.

We treat the engine with great care flushing it through regularly and keeping it stored under cover vertically (to drain fully). We are told the problem is isolated and no one else is having this problem with their eTec engine. Is this true?

We are running an eTec 200 (model number E200DHXSDS) with about 200 engine hours and the serial number is 05124808.

James, Photography

Goodwood Revival 2009

September 21, 2009 No Comments

Had a fantastic day out at Goodwood Revival on Sunday. This really is a world class event for its originality, class, atmosphere and authenticity. I haven’t been for a few years but as soon as I walked into the circuit and was hit by those unique motor racing smells and sounds of what are now classic cars I was taken back to a romantic age of boyhood awe and wonder.

I couldn’t help but think everyone must experience this place at least once in their lifetime and then again I could understand why most won’t and most won’t want to. Which got my thinking why people wouldn’t want to go to the Revival meeting and I have to admit there is something a bit exclusive about it. And by exclusive I don’t mean unattainable but more that people might feel excluded.

So I was wondering why that would be. Is it that you have to get dressed up? Well, as someone who will generally find myself at the back of the queue for anything fancy dress I can understand there is a bit of this – but this is not difficult fancy dress or embarrassing fancy dress.

What I did wonder is whether the photographs don’t capture the feel of the event. As I was walking around with my camera I thought I would have a go at trying to capture better the spirit of the event. Visually the event organisers do an amazing job of propping the event with period everything, right down to the details. So it is a fun place to take interesting photographs but my pictures, as you can see below, didn’t really improve on anything you can find in wide circulation.

But, when going through the photographs afterwards which include both crowd photographs and close ups I realised all the images, almost without fail, have something in common – no one is smiling. No one is exchanging a laugh with their neighbour somewhere in the background, wherever I looked. Don’t get me wrong, people are enjoying themselves but no one is smiling.

Thinking I had solved the problem of why one might not feel they would want to go to the Revival I went to the Goodwood website convinced I would find pictures without smiles. But alas I found smiles however I wasn’t convinced. Why? well because everyone who was smiling was dressed up with a ton of makeup and that made me think they were just actors – employed to smile!

I run the risk of sounding like I am being difficult here – maybe even obstinate. But I do think a photograph of the punters smiling and laughing is what’s needed but then did I have a great time – absolutely, but would you have got a picture of me smiling – probably not – what is all that about?

Garden, House, James

Squeezing PAYE employers with the Simplified Deduction Scheme

September 12, 2009 No Comments

hmrc CD-ROM — The dreaded HMRC Employers CD-ROM

When you load the 2009 HMRC Employers CD-ROM you are greeted with this message, ‘A Helping Hand from HM Revenue & Customs’. I think this message is put there to rile all the HMRC customers who they seem incapable of helping.

Take for example PAYE and the Simplified Deduction Scheme. Here is a system where the responsibility to collect HMRC’s taxes was loaded onto the employer. BUT at the time this system was introduced it was recognised that employers of a single domestic employee should not be required to ‘man’ a system as onerous as that of a company employing 10 or more staff. Hence the Simplified Deduction Scheme, which was a scheme open to employers of domestic employees.

The SDS allowed the domestic employer to be spared the complicated forms and the requirement to know the tax system inside out because they completed simple forms and the tax office helped with the calculations and checked your ‘workings’.

Obviously this system couldn’t be open to all and so an upper earnings limit was put in.

And that is where the catch comes. In order to gradually reduce the number of employers on this system and force them into the full PAYE system the upper earnings limit appears to have never moved or at least it has risen well below the rate of wage inflation. The result is that unless you pay below a living wage for a full time employee there is no way in 2009 that a domestic employer could qualify to be on the Simplified Deduction Scheme.

So today a domestic employer with one gardener/housekeeper etc is either required to wade through the full HMRC Employers Pack and play around with extraordinarily inefficient ‘calculators’ on the Employers CD-ROM or pay a professional to calculate the tax for them.

Had HMRC been a privately run organisation with a focus on it’s clients needs it would, of course, realised the Web was the perfect opportunity to offer a simple online calculator for Domestic Employers. Instead the public sector machine rolls along using all its best know how to find ways of un-improving its service without anyone noticing.

James, Maintenance

‘Future proofing’ the central heating

September 9, 2009 No Comments

Over the years we have been blessed with a very reliable heating and hot water system at Sennicotts. However that has presented a problem: because it hasn’t broken it has never been upgraded. So of the two oil boilers the newer boiler was installed in the early 1960’s. The older boiler we’re not sure about but it is a coal fired unit which has had an oil burner added.

It would appear the last major system work was undertaken by White, Bays & White Ltd (52 Grafton Way, London W1) whose two framed, typed lists of valves and their function we still have and is still useful. This work was presumably done after the second world war.

I did undertake an analysis of oil consumption which in today’s thinking I am a little embarrassed to be sharing. However we were using somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 ltrs of kerosene annually just to heat the hot water and central heating. Of course there are plenty of much heaver users but the dissapointing bit was that neither the house nor the hot water were that warm!

The only controls we had on the system were power on and off to the boiler, a boiler thermostat and manual zoning via the valves for the heating. There were no room thermostats and no timer. The warmest rooms in the house were those adjascent to the chimney breast and a quarter of the house had no central heating.

On paper, the decision about whether to upgrade the system looked simple, especially when the oil price spiked in 2007/2008. Payback would have come in easily less than the useful life of the new equipment and was likely to be easily less than ten years.

In the end we decided to divide the decision into two seperate cases dealing with the two boilers independently. The first was the hot water system boiler which also heated two rooms with four outside walls. The second was the main heating boiler which needed to be tackled in conjunction with improving the kitchen area and adding central heating to that wing of the house.

For the heating system a heat loss calculation of over 100kW meant adding central heating to the unheated part of the house would add such demand to the heating boiler that we would need to replace the one boiler with two. This work is due in 2010.

Hot water system

New condensing boiler and hot water cylinder with three inputs and destratification circuit

Most of our effort so far has been concentrated on the ‘hot water’ system. Unchanged for decades, this was the perfect opportunity to install a system for the future. We looked at this long and hard and were keen on a number of options including gound source, air source, solar, and biomass. A woodchip boiler was ruled out because we don’t have enough woodland of our own with existing woodland maintenance costs to sink. Ground source, air source and solar all suffered from the same problem – not enough ummpph!

With cast iron plumbing throughout and no plans to replumb it was never an option to simply heat the water in a well insulated cylinder to be called off when needed. The plumbing runs are too long and the quantity of water in thick iron cold pipes would mean a long wait and a lot of wasted water each time the hot water was called on. The hot water needs to be circulated around the system and with the large surface area of the long 1″ plus pipe runs a significant amount of heat is lost. To put this in perspective 6Kw of immersion heater couldn’t get the tank to temperature with the hot water being circulated.

the satisfying sign of efficiency - the plume from the condensing boiler

Our solution was to upgrade the system with the future in mind but to be initially heated with a condensing oil boiler and as with zoning, to give ourselves a scaleable system. The solution centred on the hot water cylinder.

Hot water cylinder.

This was designed with two key features: extra inputs and a destratification circuit.

Two extra input coils were added to the standard input giving three potential heat sources. The standard (top) coil would be heated by the condensing oil boiler. The middle coil would be spare for a future heat source (biomass, heat exchanger, or something not yet invented). The bottom coil would be for solar hot water. The cyclinder could therefore be fired by simply oil or a combination of the two main heat sources with solar topping up.

The destratification circuit was added so that in normal operation (with destratification off) the water would stratify, leaving the top of the cylinder hot and the bottom full of cold water. The advantage here is that in the morning when the cylinder calls for heat only half the tank is heated. In most circumstances the water in the top of the cylinder and the hot water pipe runs is enough to easily fill a bath. If the full tank capacity is required then a circulating pump can be manually activated which mixes (destratifies) the water in the cylinder forcing the full volume of water to be heated by the top coil.

Two immersion coils were added allowing the cylinder to run in half capacity (stratified) or full capacity.

Conclusions

The condensing oil boiler provided a significant efficiency saving and in itself would be the primary contributor to payback times. While the cylinder’s improved insulation and scaleabilty/flexibility would also contribute to the efficiency. The system has also been given a semi-intelligent timer and a hot water thermostat which allows control where there was none.

Asbestos lagging on the original heating system

We have not arrived in the future – yet. We would have like to jump into a carbon neutral solution. However looking at the options and faced with what felt like cynical pricing when we approached companies about solutions such as ground source heat pumps (they refused to identify the costs of equipment and would only give an all in installed price) we have opted for maximum efficiency (given the design of the historic property and existing pipework) and the options to add carbon neutral heat sources without a system redesign.

We recieved an excellent service and methodical design skills from our plumber. He worked with us at all stages and I am loathed to mention his name for fear he will become too busy to ever help us with phase II but he does deserve recognition for his work and expertise! You can find Will O’Brien on yell.com under O’Brien Whittle Plumbing and Heating.

Asbestos

Before any work could be done the asbestos lagging needed to be removed. This was taken as a seperate decision on the basis that it had to be removed so that in the event of an emergency we would be able to find plumbers who would be prepared to work on a repair. So the asbestos was removed in Aug 2006.

James, Maintenance

How do you lose your TV aerial?

September 1, 2009 No Comments

Surely the time has come to dispense with the TV aerial stuck on the highest point of the roof?

This question has been raised because,

We want the TV location to be flexible and at least in more rooms.
We want to be able to watch the TV on the PC/Mac
If we want to enhance the authenticty of a historic house the TV aerial doesn’t look right and let’s face it they are ugly.
Reception for some of the multiple digital channels of Freeview are poor in our area.

In an ideal world I would like to send the TV signal down the Cat5 network cables because they are already routed through the house. So the signal would go over the network to the computers and down the spare Cat5 cable direct to the TV. Although I’m sure this must be possible because the Cat5 cable must have many of the same properties as coaxial aerial cable I also know only a small amount of Cat5 cable capacity is usually used and there is probably even spare capacity to send both network and TV signals down the same cable.

Anyway back to the aerial. What I really want to do is lose it from the top of the house. The answer seems to be to find a descreet place to hide a Satellite Dish BUT I have only recently invested in TV’s that accept Freeview and therefore not Freesat.

So what I really want to do is:

Find a way of installing a Satellite Dish,
Taking a cable from this to a box that can then send out a full spectrum of channels down a Cat5 (ideal) or coaxial cable to the TV.
I would then like to take a similar feed from this ‘box’ to the computer to share the signal over the network.

So that is my solution working with the existing technology as I see it. The problem of course is that we have the Internet and now with BBC iPlayer, 4oD, ITV Player and Demand 5 we can watch so much TV over this medium. The quality is good and we can even stream TV channels live. So if I were to investigate the whole Satellite Dish option would I find in 5 years time this is all obsolete?

Will we be able to watch all our TV over the internet and will it still be called ‘TV’ anymore?

James

Having a go.

August 27, 2009 2 Comments

After many months, maybe even years deliberating, whether to set up a website for Sennicotts and whether to keep a blog, this week I just did it. Without much thought, and when I should have been doing something else, I paid up for 2 years hosting and we were off.

If you are reading this then I ought to confess this is a steep and intentional learning curve. So what I post today is unlikely to be in the same form as content I post in the future. I expect the approach and purpose to evolve.

Five years ago I was mulling over how it is so fashionable/cool to not be seen trying. I sometimes wonder if this was the main thing I learnt at school. We had just had our first child and as I started to think about the values we as a family would try to nurture I couldn’t help but feel we could look back at the end of our days with a degree of satisfaction and even acclompishment if we had lived by the motto ‘Try Hard and Try Again’. I even asked a friend who was a Latin and classics teacher what this would be in Latin. The answer:

‘Multum temptate tum temptate rursum’

So this is what I will do here: try to make this content informative, interesting, entertaining if possible, and if I don’t succeed at first I will try again!

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