Monday January 3rd 2022

This morning a few minutes after 4AM the howling wind woke me up. The latest cold front was approaching. I got the open windows closed before it started to rain. The weather reports indicate it was a very brief rain and wind event in this area, but I was back asleep, so I can’t confirm it. When I did get up this morning the sun was shining, the wind was blowing out of the northeast and the temperature was in the low sixties. It never got any warmer.

When I returned from my first walk of the day, my long ignored TV troubles doubled. The back light on my main TV broke more than a year ago in late 2020. I learned to work around the problem while waiting to find an appropriate replacement. Today the TV in my bedroom bit the dust in similar way. Everything works, you just can’t see the picture unless you shine a flashlight on the screen at the correct angle.

There isn’t a good simple solution to the problem. The cost to fix the 32 inch TV in the bedroom is about the cost of a replacement TV. Fixing the 42 inch TV in the living area might be viable if I had a free helper to get the TV off the wall and transported to a repair facility. An at home repair service, assuming they’d agree that my RV qualifies, would bring the cost close to the replacement cost of the 42 inch TV. All of this assumes the replacement parts are available and not back ordered from Asia.

Replacing the TVs is also tricky. They are both mounted with custom brackets and openings in the wall behind them for the cables. When I investigated the 42 inch TV replacement I found that new TVs of a similar size didn’t use the same size mounting pattern. Mounting a replacement would require fabricating a new mounting system. This is one of the repairs I have tried off and on to get RV service people to work on without success. So today, when I started to investigate replacing the smaller bedroom TV, I didn’t have a lot of hope.

It turns out that LG hasn’t changed the mounting bracket size or the location of the connections significantly in the new models from the six year old model. It seems to be the only brand that uses a 200mm square mounting pattern. Most of the other 32 inch TVs are using a 100mm square pattern. Tomorrow I’ll take my current TV off the wall and check for other issues and maybe make a trip to Best Buy for a replacement. I also have a backup plan. My third TV is in a compartment outside that I don’t use often. It is identical to the broken TV in the bedroom. I could bring it inside, but a quick look at its mounting bracket was discouragingly complicated.

While looking for a suitable replacement for the 32 inch TV, I may have found a solution for the bigger 42 inch TV. Toshiba makes a TV with a 400mm by 200mm mounting that I might be able to use by drilling two new holes in the mounting bracket which was designed for a 400mm square mounting. I’m not impressed with the quality of the Toshiba, but anything may be better than nothing. If all goes well with the 32 inch replacement, I might try to replace the bigger 42 inch TV myself. The concern with managing the bulky TV alone remains, but knowing that I don’t have to find someone to weld a new bracket is a positive.