Repairability Chronicles, Part 1
There’s a certain kind of joy in being able to repair something. That joy is higher when the item repaired falls into the planned obsolescence trap. I’ve repaired a handful of things just like that this past year, and have a few stories to tell. What follows is the first story.
The TV
Around 2022, the “cheap” LG television I had bought around 2016-2017, for roughly 500 euro (not really “cheap”, but like portuguese folks say, “that’s money”), started to turn blue.
What do I mean by turning blue? No, not the 90s dance music allegory to being depressed. I mean one would look at the picture and it was less bright and with a blue-ish tone.
At first we thought: our minds were fooling us.
Maybe the picture had always been this way. But having seen the Lord of the Rings extended editions one too-many times I knew something was wrong: I could no longer see the night-time / dark sections of those movies.
If there is one thing I’m certain about is that I should be able to see those.
This is a series of movies made at a time when people didn’t eat as much carrots while looking for bombers on a radar, opposite to modern shows and movies, where if you close your eyes, the experience is about the same as keeping them open for the entire length of what you’re watching. Oh, by the way, on newer TVs, if you decide turn your brightness to the maximum to try to see something, according to the instructions manual, you’re effectively cutting the lifetime of your brand new TV by half with every added minute of watch-time. Your TV is ready to go gently into that good night in 5 years minutes.
Despair set in. Our TV is turning blue. What are we gonna do now? Read one of the too many books we are compulsively purchasing as of late, but don’t make enough time to read? Despair! The horror!
A quick multi-hour rabbit-hole dive into Youtube helped me reach some conclusions:
- This happens to more people. It’s not an rare case. And it happens often beyond 1 to 3 year warranty obligations by the TV manufacturers.
- The issue is that there’s faulty LED strips behind a “magical diffusion” panel that sits behind the “LCD screen”.
- Those LED strips can go bad, and instead of providing a white-coloured light, provide a blue-ish / purple-ish tone, until they provide no light at all.
- The actual source of the issue being related to the LED strip build quality and lifespan, and that being directly impacted by brightness selected by the user and overall usage.
- Also, the world is not over yet, it is repairable! All these Serbian and Romanian Youtubers are doing it and make it look easy.
- The comment sections of these videos show promise, a lot of what looks to me like gibberish, but a lot of thumbs ups and smiley faces.
- No I will not google translate these, they seem happy, that’s all that matters.
So I thought to myself:
I can fix it.
I went to Ebay. Found what looked to be the correct LED strips, shipping from China. They arrived about 2-3 weeks afterwards. And life looked good.
And then… we proceeded to buy a new fancier TV at a discount, that would play some videogames at a frequency of 120HZ.
You know how many games actually run at 120 fps on a newer console, in the year 2023 A.C.(After Covid)?
Games that got released in 2016. Like Uncharted 4, that after a paid patch, can run in 120 fps. Since then no new games have come out, such is life. So I proceeded to play Uncharted 4 another time. Another time you ask? Yes. In this one’s case and also Red Dead Redemption 2’s case, I’ve since stopped counting how many times I’ve finished these two games, instead making it a yearly replay pilgrimage, where I ponder on life, adulthood, and feel feelings for these videogame characters, wishing some day I too will go out and find lost pirate ships, or be able to say “hello mister” to everyone on the street and talk to a Nun about life and all the bad decisions I’ve made.
Folks, you’re dispersing here, please focus, let’s get back to the topic at hand people.
“Ah yes, I need to fix the faulty TV. I have the parts, I’ll get to it right away and fix it this weekend!”
I told myself this for about a year. Life finds a way.
Then I gathered courage to finally do it, at one of these “so… what am I doing with my life” moments. You know, those moments that become as familiar as the neighbor you see every other day and say good morning/afternoon, but know nothing of their life. They could be a serial killer. Or a musical prodigy. Or both!
I started disassembling the faulty TV, while re-listening to an amalgamation of TOOL and Nine-Inch Nails, and also some Spongebob Hawaian music, for good measure. It was a challenge. The Eastern european friends were doing it much faster on the video. I tried carefully not touching any electrical parts, lest I be bitten by a radioactive capacitor and start getting even better 5g signal reception.
TV was fully disassembled, I could see the faulty LED strips. Alright let’s do this!
Wait a minute…
Ah crap, the replacement LED strips, they’re the wrong ones! Indeed the sales-ad on Ebay said something in giant letters, in plain english, like:
ONLY ORDER AFTER YOU DISASSEMBLE THE TV AND YOU ARE SURE OF THE LED STRIP MODEL YOU NEED. AS SOME MODELS CAN HAVE EITHER THIS STRIP OR THE OTHER, EVEN WITHIN THE SAME TV MODEL.
I had a choice now:
- A) Would I send a message to the chinese ebay seller after a year, or
- B) lick my wounds and order the correct LED strips from another seller?
So I took the road less travelled (no, not the scientology-esque dog-whistle expression).
I went ahead and ordered the new correct LED strips from another seller. I did not have the LED strip tester that I see some of the eastern european repair people using on the videos, so I thought, well, we’re just gonna have to trust it’ll all work out in the end. The LED strips arrived. I put on some Linkin Park and got to it.
I grab my wife’s old hair drier, and start blowing at the old strips to try to get the glue under them to budge a bit so I can remove them. I manage to snap all 3, and carefully place the new ones.
Roll the montage of putting stuff back into it’s place. Push it to the limit… Limit! Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na!
Closed everything up, fearing at times that I will forget a screw, as I had a tendency as a teenager to end up with orphan screws when repairing and reassembling things, such is life.
Plugged the TV in… Turned it on…
YES!
Victory! It works! It’s as good as new! I feel amazing! I can do anything I set my mind on! And it only cost 30 euros to give new life back to this TV… plus 30 euro of the wrong LED strips, but let’s write that off to a learning expense!
Great! Amazing! I now feel guilty for owning 2 TVs, or even buying a new one instead of repairing the first one right away. Guilt all around! If this happens to the new TV, that one is even less repairable according to some other Youtube videos. Why did I do this? Consumerism is bad! What about the planet? I’m destroying the planet!
Images of pollution and a baby monkey crying in a rain forest come to mind. Well, at least they’re not in a blue-ish tone.