Yes, I know Google can be very helpful for all sorts of things, I use it all the time for finding useless information, and believe me, when it comes to TV repairs most of the advice on there is just that…useless, written by people with no formal training or skills, or even regard for their own…and others, safety!

Most trades are regulated in some way, you can’t, or shouldn’t, even install a 13 amp socket or an ...

Well the first three days of this week were spent in Paris, leaving me just a couple of days to catch up on all the work. There were multiple messages left on the answerphone, as we expected, so Yvonne got cracking on those straight away. I find it unbelievable that people knew from the message that we would be back at work on Thursday but couldn’t actually wait that long, aerial work had gone elsewhere and a possible ...

Anyone that’s read my earlier posts may be aware of the problems with Panasonic DVD Recorders recording a favourites list rather than the selected timer program. This only happens with BBC channels and the theory is that it was an update the BBC had done to their red button / digital text service. Up to now nothing seemed to provide a cure for this but Panasonic have just made us aware that an over the air software update ...

I seem to be getting a lot of Hi Fi in for repair at the moment, I have a customer near Stogumber with a very nice Teac system and some time ago I was called to service the amplifier, this time it was the CD player that needed attention. Sometimes it would play and sometimes not, I thought it may be simply a case of cleaning the lens on the laser, this is very common, but in this ...

I seem to have been looking at some really old gear recently, just shows how well built it was back then…the eighties in this case. But first, I had a mixed bag of jobs this morning…an aerial extension into two bedrooms, thankfully working indoors as outside it was blowing a gale and hailing. Then it was a simple job of connecting up a YouView box, then disabling a child lock at my next call, and then an even ...

I had this morning free and really needed to get into the workshop to complete a few repairs, there was also a 37″ Samsung that had been dropped off at our house to look at, and a customer just around the corner with a 26″ Sony that was freezing on channel change, then rebooting itself. I had a nasty feeling this was another software problem associated with the BBC red button, the clue…it only happens on BBC channels! ...

Well today was always going to be about the 50″ Samsung Plasma I’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. Sound but no picture, doesn’t sound too bad does it, but on these it can get very complicated indeed. At the customers house I noticed that the top buffer IC had destroyed itself, this means the one below it is probably gone as well, also a whole host of parts on the Y-Sus panel. It’s a ...

Today started with a couple of aerial jobs, one inside and one outside in the terrible wind. The one in the loft was easy enough, just replace a two way masthead with a four way and run a lead into a bedroom, I was even able to use some existing trunking to hide the cable down the wall…an easy job.

Next it was out with the ladders and up on to a roof in Washford where the ...

Today started with something I haven’t done in a long time…putting a hairdryer into a video recorder! Why, you might ask…well I was called to install this machine not knowing that it had just been brought in from a cold car. Videos suffer badly from condensation and being brought into a warm room had caused a lot of it to form on the rotating heads. In this condition putting a cassette in results in the tape sticking to…and ...