May 1 Podcast #685: How to care for your HDTV
Most of us want to preserve the life of our home theater investments. Some, who want to upgrade, may not. For those, do the exact opposite of what we talk about. For the rest of us who want to protect our hard-earned investment, to make sure our televisions to last as long as possible, there are a few simple things to remember to make sure you get the most hours you can from it. Most of these apply to any piece of electronics you have in your theater: receivers, DVRs, Blu-ray players, projectors, you name it.
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How to care for your HDTV
Most of us want to preserve the life of our home theater investments. Some, who want to upgrade, may not. For those, do the exact opposite of what we talk about. For the rest of us who want to protect our hard-earned investment, to make sure our televisions to last as long as possible, there are a few simple things to remember to make sure you get the most hours you can from it. Most of these apply to any piece of electronics you have in your theater: receivers, DVRs, Blu-ray players, projectors, you name it.
Keep it cool
Nothing kills a TV prematurely like heat. The TV, especially if you have a plasma, will heat up quite easily on its own. All this heat, if it can’t dissipate, can destroy the internal components of your television. If you don’t allow for adequate air flow or ventilation around the television, you may be killing your set off before its prime. Your television manufacturer will typically list ventilation requirements in your manual.
If you live in a very hot climate, you should be concerned about the life of your TV. Not that it needs its own cooling system or dedicated air conditioning unit, but if it is difficult to get heat to leave the room, it will be that much more difficult to get heat to leave the TV. Proper ventilation is key, but you may also want to consider installing some small fans, either in your TV cabinet or near the television, to make sure the air is always moving. Some after-market thermal controlled fans can be used to turn on only when a specific heat threshold is met.
It isn’t just heat, humidity can also cause severe damage to a television set. Liquid is the enemy of electrical components and humidity is no different. Do your best to keep the area clean and dry. If you don’t keep it clean, the moisture in the air could mix with the dust in the TV set and form some very damaging gunk on your sensitive circuit boards. More on keeping them clean later. But make sure you keep them dry.
While very cold temperatures can impact the performance of the TV, very rarely will they have a negative impact on the life of the TV, unless the extreme cold is also coupled with moisture of some kind. However, rapid swings in temperature, where the set goes from very cold to very hot and then back again, in a short amount of time, can wreak havoc as well. The electronics are tested for extreme temperatures, but assuming you’ll be in Arizona if its hot or Alaska if it’s cold. Try to keep the environment consistent.
Keep it clean
Dust and dirt are another plague on the extended life of an HDTV. As we mentioned before, dust, especially when mixed with moisture from humidity or anything else, can cause severe damage to the TV. The dust-moisture mixture can cause electrical circuits to connect to the wrong chips, shorting them or overloading them. It’s like the classic problem of “bugs” in mainframe days. Anything on the circuit board that isn’t supposed to be there can cause problems.
Proper ventilation is very helpful to reduce dust formation, but even with good airflow, dust still builds up on and around your television set. Routine cleaning is critical. Don’t allow the dust to build up long enough that it can cause an issue. Use a soft rag to remove the dust from the exterior of the television cabinet. If there are vents in the cabinet, blowing them out with a can of compressed air can be quite helpful. You’ll want to be careful with this, though. You don’t want to blow all the dust deeper into the TV and cause your own build-up mess deep inside the bowels of the television.
Keep the usage smooth
Your television likes to do what you ask of it. It likes to perform for you. But it doesn’t like to do tricks. The less you make your TV work, the longer it will last. For example, the climate issue of quick changes in temperature is not good for the TV. Keep the air temperature consistent as much as possible. Also, constantly turning the TV on and off can cause problems. It shouldn’t. And all manufacturers test this (or at least should be testing it), but the power up/self test/initialize sequence can be intensive. Performing that rapidly and repeatedly could be problematic.
You should also look to keep the power going into the TV as smooth and consistent as possible. This more than likely means the use of a power center with power conditioning. Something that will sit between your TV and the wall outlet to make sure that a sudden jolt in power, or a momentary dip in power, won’t make it through to the TV. If you’re using a UPS to maintain power to the TV even if you lose power in your home, make sure the UPS provides smooth (sine wave) power, not choppy (stepped wave) power.
For many years to come
In the end some simple rules to follow and a couple quick maintenance steps can make sure you get the maximum life out of any HDTV, or any home theater component for that matter. Whether you want to preserve your TV or projector, receiver or amplifier, the rules are pretty much the same. If you’re in the market for an upgrade and need an excuse, ignore everything we said. In fact, do the exact opposite. Your TV will come to a screeching halt in no time.
It is important to remember that despite your best efforts, home electronics aren’t perfect. You may put all the love and attention into your television that you humanly can, and it can still fail. There may be a component failure that is completely outside your control. Chips fail, boards die, pixels stick. It just happens. Doing the simple things we talked about won’t guarantee your TV will last for a long time, but it will improve your odds significantly.
Reader Comments (3)
Power Cycling & vacuum tube days: The power cycling on vacuum tubes wasn't that it would crack the tube. (I have never seen a tube crack in this way; drop them or take a hammer to them, yes, but not by power cycling.) Rather, the heating and cooling of the filament would put a bit of stress on the filament and after enough power cycling a weak spot would form in the filament, and that weak spot would provide a higher resistance to electricity and become a hotter spot than the rest of the filament, which would produce even more thermal shock at that spot, weakening it more and creating even more resistance, until at one time that spot would become so hot that spot would melt and the filament would break apart into two pieces, causing an open so current would no longer flow in the filament and the cathode (electron emitter of the tube) wouldn't get warm enough to emit electrons, basically killing the tube. It's the same thermal shock the old incandescent light bulbs went through (and the flash of light when the bulb died was from a spot on the filament hitting melting temperature). Back in the days of TVs being loaded with vacuum tubes, the first diagnostic step to "no sound" or "no picture" was to turn on the TV for a few minutes, turn the TV off, and feel which tubes were a bit warm (ok) and which were dead cold (probably filament burned out), and sometimes that saved one from taking a bunch of tubes to the grocery store and testing each one on the tube tester at the store. The "instant on" TVs were a bit less harsh on the filaments by keeping the filaments warm (but not operationally hot) when the TV was "off", so the temperature swings were fewer, but at the cost of more electricity and more heat, even with the TV "off".
With LCD TVs, the cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) that provides the light behind older LCD TVs and the mechanism for starting them typically involve a surge voltage to get the bit of gas inside to ionize. While lack of a heating filament means the tube doesn't have a fragile filament to burn out as described above, but the electronics would sometimes fail since it had to provide a starting voltage and then switch to a lower running voltage. Also, the warming and cooling of the tubes could possibly provide slow leaks where the wire penetrated the glass, and if enough air leaks in the gas inside wouldn't ionize. Also, the imbedded computer systems tend to not just hate heat, but expansion when they warm up from use and contraction when they cool down when "off" can eventually cause failures.
LED TVs are actually LCD TVs but with light emitting diodes providing the light behind the liquid crystal panels. Since there are lower voltages, no "strike" (starting) voltages, no ionizing of gas, no differential expansion between glass and wire to cause failures, I would expect them to be more tolerant to power cycles. However, there are still power relays and slight surges when the TV comes on, and the warming and cooling of the imbedded computer system can eventually lead to failure.
And you are absolutely right about heat being the bane of modern electronics. Ventilation helps. My place isn't air conditioned and when it gets really hot (about 10 days out of the year where I live), I don't even use the big TV when it is too hot in the room, but I will use the smaller TV since there is less power becoming heat on the screen (due to the much smaller screen) and, if I am going to replace a TV due to baking it, I would rather have it be the cheaper TV. :)
Bug: While Grace Hopper may have been the head researcher when one of her technicians fund a moth in the computer in 1947, her journal entry makes it clear that "bug" was a well-known engineering term by then. In fact, a "bug in the system" was an engineering phrase dating back at least to 1873 when Thomas Edison used "bug" to refer to flaws in developing a system (in his case, a quadruplex telegraph system that would allow four telegraph operators to transmit on the same wire at the same time) and Edison popularized that use of "bug". Grace Hopper's journal entry brought "bug" to the attention of those in the computer profession and "debugging" became the shorthand way of saying one was looking for and removing flaws in the hardware or software.
"Bug" in Middle English meant "scarecrow, demon" or gremlin, perhaps derived from Welsh "bwg" for ghost.
I could tell you that some of my debugging sessions have felt like a battle to find a demon in my code! It doesn't take much of an imagination to go from "Bwg in the computer" to the movie title, "Ghost in the Machine". :)
Don't use a vacuum on electronics guts, it's a sure fire way to zap them. A standard vacuum generates static electricity that can take out electronic components, that's why caned air is available for dusting off electronics. Special vacuums are available for electronics but don't assume your vacuum is static free unless you bought if for that purpose. Using a vacuum on the outside is fine, in fact it can be of benefit say for...
Vacuum the top of your TV (or other properly shielded and protected electronics) rather than use a dust cloth, a dust cloth can knock dust into the vents, a good vacuum will not.
Cheers,