My living room TV recently got smashed - it’s an occupational hazard of having small children.
Instead of buying a new one, I fixed it myself and it’s now as good as new, and the whole
thing only left me about 50 British pounds out of pocket.
Coming up I’ll show you how I fixed it, and how it cost me so little!
In my case the only damage to the TV was to the screen itself - everything else still
functioned perfectly well, and in fact you could still watch TV by adjusting the picture
size, albeit on the equivalent of a smaller screen.
So, all I needed was a new panel for this TV.
However, it’s neither easy nor cost effective to buy just a panel for a specific TV model,
so the alternative is to hope to find someone else selling this exact model of TV which
has a DIFFERENT fault, so that we can scavenge the parts needed whilst keeping costs low
due to the fact we’d be buying a faulty TV rather than just replacing our broken TV
with a second-hand equivalent - which would of course be an option, but it would cost
more and wouldn’t really count as “fixing the TV”!
I turned to eBay as my first port of call.
To make sure you’re searching for the right TV, type the exact model number of your TV
which you’ll usually find round the back.
You can refine your search by selecting Used only, although with a 7 year old TV that wasn’t
much of an issue for me.
Ideally, to get the cheapest price you want to find one that’s faulty, but obviously
with nothing wrong with the screen.
It was hardly surprising that I didn’t find the exact one for sale straight away, but
the great thing about eBay is you can save your search and have it notify you if something
comes up, so that’s exactly what I did.
Amazingly, less than a week later THIS showed up!
I’ve put a link in the video description to where you can learn more about Saved Searches
on eBay.
So I found this one on eBay for £100 and negotiated it down to £80 as I was willing
to forgo the stand - fine by me.
It was local collection only, but the seller was happy for it to be collected by a Parcel
Force driver, which cost me £19.90.
So total outlay to start with, 10p under £100 at £99.90.
“A hundred quid?”, I hear you say...
well, keep watching and you’ll see how that tumbled down to half that figure.
So, order placed with eBay seller and courier arranged.
When it arrived it looked like this, it was well wrapped in copious amounts of bubble
wrap and lots of fragile stickers, as well as cardboard protecting the screen itself,
so thanks to the eBay seller for that!
The fault with this one is that it was stuck in a boot loop - ie., you turn it on, it appears
to start turning on and you see the logo, then it goes back to the start, you see the
logo... etc. etc.
However, crucially the screen is absolutely fine.
I reckoned that the fault with this TV was most likely to be down to a faulty motherboard
inside it - and since I knew that there was nothing wrong with the motherboard in my smashed
TV, it was clear that the easiest thing to do was actually use my TV as the “donor”
to repair this TV - that way I wouldn’t have to undertake the very perilous task of
carefully transplanting the fragile LCD panel.
Before the repair gets underway, I just want to take a moment to give a very quick shoutout
to this video’s sponsor, Audible.
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Everyone’s a winner!
Right, time to get started on the surgery then!
My operating theatre would be the living room floor, cleared of children's’ toys as it’s
important to have a clear and tidy spacious area to work in.
Remove the TV stand if it has one, and then start off by laying both TVs side-by-side
on the floor face-down and carefully remove all the screws from around the back outer
edge.
You should then be able to remove both TVs’ back panels to reveal the circuit boards and
connecting ribbon cables underneath.
On this TV, the green board on the left is the mainboard, or motherboard, and the light
brown one on the right is the powerboard.
Swapping the motherboards over is an extremely simple process - all you need to do is carefully
unplug all the connecting cables and unscrew the board, then repeat the same process on
the other TV.
Then, take the working motherboard from the smashed TV and screw it down inside the new
TV and connect the cables back up.
The bezel on the TV I received in the post was slightly cracked in one corner, despite
all the bubble wrap, and I reckoned that the back plate from my original TV was in slightly
better condition too, so I took the bezel off my TV and attached it to the new one,
and used my back plate when screwing it all back together.
Then it was just a case of fitting the stand back on again, connecting up the power and
input cables and awaiting the moment of truth - the TV successfully booted up and stayed
on, and the display worked flawlessly, so an excellent afternoon’s work all round!
Now... the title of this video says for about £50 and you’ll remember from the start
of the video that I actually spent just under double that.
Well, I’m now left with an array of TV parts which still have some value and could be of
use to other people with a compatible TV but different fault so I put the parts back on
eBay to see how much of that hundred pounds I could recoup.
Let’s take a look, so to recap the TV cost £80, and I spent £19.90 on arranging a ParcelForce
courier to collect it.
Total outlay, £99.90.
I sold the fully-working power board for £30, the T-con board for £9.99, the internal speakers
for a fiver and even the faulty mainboard with bidding starting at a penny sold for
£8.50....
When you factor in how much I charged for Postage and Packaging and then minus the actual
postage cost, PayPal Fees and eBay final listing fees that brings the grand overall total cost
to me of the repair to just over £50 at £51.57.
That’s not at all bad, considering the TV cost £750 brand new in 2011, and the cheapest
equivalent even today would still cost around £500 - so about 10 times what it cost me
to repair this TV, plus I got to make a video for all you lovely Switched on Network subscribers,
too!
And I hope this video has inspired you to fix your own things when they get broken!
The precise procedure will of course vary from TV to TV, but this should give you a
general idea of what’s possible and how easy it is.
Do let us know if you attempt a repair having watched this video - we’d love to know and
to see it!
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For now though, thanks for watching and I’ll see you again soon!