The Advice Thread

[Biff Mayhem]

This is still the most memorable commercial for me (with a nod to Mr. Microphone which I quote at least once a week)

 

 

[Shades of Deivi Cruz]

I had forgotten about those Highland commercials. So great.

Last night my main TV bit the dust. Was watching baseball playoffs, and then I wasn't... Could still hear the audio, but the panel just completely died... So, I'm looking at the LG C1 OLED. It looks great, but the one that died was an LG and not that old (4.5 years, I believe). Any others I should consider? Looking at 55 inch.

[casimir]

50 watts per channel, Babycakes.

[John_Brian_K]

23 minutes ago, Shades of Deivi Cruz said:

I had forgotten about those Highland commercials. So great.

Last night my main TV bit the dust. Was watching baseball playoffs, and then I wasn't... Could still hear the audio, but the panel just completely died... So, I'm looking at the LG C1 OLED. It looks great, but the one that died was an LG and not that old (4.5 years, I believe). Any others I should consider? Looking at 55 inch.

I have a Sony 55 that I have had for a long time and it is holding up nicely.  You get what you pay for.  I also have this behemoth 82 Samsung that I got for peanuts...my Sony 55 is a better TV for sure. 

When it comes to electronics you really have to dig and do your homework, more times than not you get what you pay for, but you may be able to find good deals on good brands if you do some digging.  

4.5 years is not very long at all for a TV.  If it were me I would stay away from LG for that reason alone, I have never owned an LG TV though.

[oblong]

I've bought 2 TV's in the last 20 years.

Finally got an HDTV in 2008 or 2009....  42" for like $1000, then last year finally upgraded to a 55" for like $300

 

[Biff Mayhem]

We have a 60" Samsung curved tv that we are very pleased with. Picked it up two or three years ago from the walmarts for not much moolah.

[Shades of Deivi Cruz]

41 minutes ago, John_Brian_K said:

I have a Sony 55 that I have had for a long time and it is holding up nicely.  You get what you pay for. 

Oh I paid plenty for that LG, which makes it all the more frustrating.  It was the EG9100 series, which was one of their higher end models at the time.

[John_Brian_K]

The # of TV's I have is ridiculous.  That 55 Sony is in my garage.

If you paid big bucks for a TV and it only lasted 5 years...I would def not go back to that brand.  Honestly I have always found Sony products to be top of the line.

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, John_Brian_K said:

I have a Sony 55 that I have had for a long time and it is holding up nicely.  You get what you pay for.  I also have this behemoth 82 Samsung that I got for peanuts...my Sony 55 is a better TV for sure. 

When it comes to electronics you really have to dig and do your homework, more times than not you get what you pay for, but you may be able to find good deals on good brands if you do some digging.  

4.5 years is not very long at all for a TV.  If it were me I would stay away from LG for that reason alone, I have never owned an LG TV though.

Not sure you can judge a brand by anecdote. I've had good luck with every LG product I've bought, including a couple of  displays.  Not recommending them necessarily but random failures can strike everywhere, you need some stats to determine if they are relevant

Also, the odds are pretty good that if your display just went right to dead with no prior degradation of the video it probably died because a $0.50 capacitor quit in the power supply circuit. Very common failure mode for electronics of all kinds. If you have a little ambition and a soldering iron.......

Edited October 20, 2021 by gehringer_2

[John_Brian_K]

7 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

Not sure you can judge a brand by anecdote. I've had good luck with every LG product I've bought, including a couple of  displays.  Not recommending them necessarily but random failures can strike everywhere, you need some stats to determine if they are relevant

Also, the odds are pretty good that if your display just went right to dead with no prior degradation of the video it probably died because a $0.50 capacitor quit in the power supply circuit. Very common failure mode for electronics of all kinds. If you have a little ambition and a soldering iron.......

100%, but I think across the board Sony usually is at the tops in terms of quality and value etc.  I have not looked it up in awhile, but I know they used to be.

Depending on how much I paid for the TV would depend on if I open it up or not.  What is the time worth?  It is an individual decision.  I have been known to spend WAAAAAY too much time trying to fix something out of spite more than out of a cost analysis.

[Shades of Deivi Cruz]

29 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

If you have a little ambition and a soldering iron.......

I have neither of those things.

[gehringer_2]

17 minutes ago, Shades of Deivi Cruz said:

I have neither of those things.

I haz a sad for you

[Shades of Deivi Cruz]

5 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

I haz a sad for you

I should clarify. I'm not a fixer. Of anything. Not appliances. Not electronics. Not plumbing. Not drywall. Nothing. I've tried to become one, many times, with many failures and curse words in my wake. I am now at the point in my life where I have accepted and embraced this about myself, which is for the betterment of myself and (especially) those around me.

(NOTE: I did successfully replace a light fixture in our closet with an LED version, with only one F-bomb in the process. Although, I do believe the Mrs is still concerned about it potentially falling on her some morning when she's trying to get ready.)

[oblong]

2 minutes ago, Shades of Deivi Cruz said:

I should clarify. I'm not a fixer. Of anything. Not appliances. Not electronics. Not plumbing. Not drywall. Nothing. I've tried to become one, many times, with many failures and curse words in my wake. I am now at the point in my life where I have accepted and embraced this about myself, which is for the betterment of myself and (especially) those around me.

(NOTE: I did successfully replace a light fixture in our closet with an LED version, with only one F-bomb in the process. Although, I do believe the Mrs is still concerned about it potentially falling on her some morning when she's trying to get ready.)

if the house was built more than 50 years ago that is such a pain.  It seems the boxes and holes are never right.  We put up a ceiling fan in our dining room in place of a light fixture and had nothing to work with.  Luckily I had a helper, an old timer who could do anything, and we drilled into the metal box for one of the support screws.  Once the bracket was up I held myself on it to test it and it was good.

Dealing with all the excess wiring and getting things flush is tricky.  I am always worried about cutting off too much.  It's probably a lot easier with 2 people so that you don't have to hold the figure and wrap the plastic thing around the wires yourself.. but you also don't want the wife to see how easy it can be.  Gotta milk that baby.

 

[casimir]

1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

If you have a little ambition and a soldering iron.......

 

1 hour ago, Shades of Deivi Cruz said:

I have neither of those things.

Verified.

[CMRivdogs]

1 hour ago, Shades of Deivi Cruz said:

I should clarify. I'm not a fixer. Of anything. Not appliances. Not electronics. Not plumbing. Not drywall. Nothing. I've tried to become one, many times, with many failures and curse words in my wake. I am now at the point in my life where I have accepted and embraced this about myself, which is for the betterment of myself and (especially) those around me.

 

As the late Glen Hague said many times the most important tool in your toolbox is your wallet (or something to that effect).

In the long run sometimes it’s cheaper to hire someone the first time than to pay extra to have them fix your mistakes.

[oblong]

I need a tree looked at and finally got someone to come out.... they're 10 weeks behind and by then it's too late to trim as they wouldn't know what's dead and not.   Plus he said my tree looks like it's dying.

[Edman85]

On 10/14/2021 at 5:03 PM, chasfh said:

OK, I’ll start with some proactive advice.

Don’t you just love going to a dealer to buy a new car, seeing one you want, and then spending hours or even days wrestling with any number of salespeople and their managers for the adversarial purpose of trying to wring every last dollar out of each other? Yeah, me neither.

Last time I did that was over, of all things, a Honda Accord. I remember it taking over an hour at the end trying to get the guy under $19,000, they’re trying to keep me well above that, managers are shuttling in and out of the room to combat me, and we settle on $19,050. I walked away with my stomach in knots. One of my worst purchase experiences ever.

The next time I bought a car, I decided that rather than going through that nonsense again, instead of working in person with a dealer on a car I see on the lot, I decided to determine the exact car I want first, then bid that car out to multiple dealers.

First step: “build” the car you want, down to each individual option, then determine the MSRP and Invoice cost on the car. You can do that fairly easily online at a few different websites.

Next, develop a list of dealers to bid the car out to. You should probably plan to contact at least ten to start; more depending on how ambitious you are. Make an initial phone call (not email) to the new car sales manager and tell them, I am definitely buying a car in the next few weeks, I’m contacting several dealers and will go with the one that gives me the best price, and do you want to participate? At least 80% of them will say yes, many of them eagerly. Then ask for their email address.

After you have the list of participants in hand, email an identical letter to each one: I am ready to buy a car, I’m asking for proposals from a number of dealers, and I will buy from the dealer who gives me the best price. Here’s the car I want, and list out every option, all with their Invoice and MSRP, along with the totals for the whole car, so they know that you know what their costs are. Also tell them you’re aware of whatever buyer incentives there are, and to NOT factor those into the final price. Also, if you can afford to, tell them you are NOT offering them a trade-in, since they can manipulate their bid based on that. Try to keep the trade-in part separate from the purchase part.

Then tell them that after you get all the first bids from everyone, you will report the best bid to all participants and give them just one shot at beating that price. Tell them that second-round bid will be final, and that you will contact the winner at that point to finalize the deal, discuss financing, and arrange to sign paperwork. You don't want to go back to the well more than twice, because that's unseemly and leaves a bad taste with them. (When you do move into the second round, start with the highest bid dealer and work backwards to the best bid dealer, so that the best bid gets better as you move toward the initial first round best bid.)

Then, and this is important: be sure to follow through exactly on this plan. Do this only if you are 100% certain you are buying car. Otherwise, they’ll remember you next time you try this and it might not work so well.

I’ve bought my last four cars using this method and not only have I saved thousands of dollars each time, but as importantly, I’ve avoided the knots in my stomach from the angst of going back and forth with an adversary much better trained and more experienced to do so than I could ever be. After all, you negotiate with a dealer only once every few years—they do it as their job every single day.

Try this next time you buy a car. You won't regret it.

I'm fortunate to be in a spot where I can do this and plan for it, but I did something like this last time with one extra caveat. I had saved the cash. This gave me incredible leverage at the dealership. In addition to making good financial sense (cars depreciate, so loans are bad), it allows for a better deal.

[chasfh]

2 hours ago, Edman85 said:

I'm fortunate to be in a spot where I can do this and plan for it, but I did something like this last time with one extra caveat. I had saved the cash. This gave me incredible leverage at the dealership. In addition to making good financial sense (cars depreciate, so loans are bad), it allows for a better deal.

See, now that's the opposite of my experience with dealers, which is that they want you to finance the car with them because that's one of the two key ways they make money (the other being service).

That said, I've paid cash in high interest rate times and that's worked out better for me. This time around I took the 0.9% deal. If inflation is going to stay at 5+% for much longer, it'll ed up being a good deal for me.

[chasfh]

7 hours ago, Shades of Deivi Cruz said:

I had forgotten about those Highland commercials. So great.

Last night my main TV bit the dust. Was watching baseball playoffs, and then I wasn't... Could still hear the audio, but the panel just completely died... So, I'm looking at the LG C1 OLED. It looks great, but the one that died was an LG and not that old (4.5 years, I believe). Any others I should consider? Looking at 55 inch.

Get the biggest TV you can afford. Once you get to a certain age, the older you get, the farther away it looks. 😂

[oblong]

Any suggestions on wiring a cable through a wall? 

We're going to be working from home, probably permanently in some format, and right now I run my ethernet from my router, down the basement stairs, located a few feet away.... it's part of my routine to plug that in each morning and unplug it at 3:30, then it hangs down by my basement stairs....  I have it run along my basement ceiling.

Where i want to put it in the wall is right next to where my cable line comes into the router.  The other side of that is my furnace room ceiling and it's less than a foot away  I just can't tell if that hole is the same one I see from the basement or if there's another one in between.  I see the power outlet wiring and cable line coming through.  I was going to drill the hole and find out if I can see the cable from the basement.  If not, then I know I need two holes.... so how do I easily connect the two?  I'm sure a cable guy can do this in 3 minutes.  what do I need to do it?  I don't want to drill the hole until I know I can do it, then I'll buy a proper ethernet plate and make it pretty, or incur the wrath of my wife of course.

 

 

 

[gehringer_2]

16 minutes ago, oblong said:

Any suggestions on wiring a cable through a wall? 

We're going to be working from home, probably permanently in some format, and right now I run my ethernet from my router, down the basement stairs, located a few feet away.... it's part of my routine to plug that in each morning and unplug it at 3:30, then it hangs down by my basement stairs....  I have it run along my basement ceiling.

Where i want to put it in the wall is right next to where my cable line comes into the router.  The other side of that is my furnace room ceiling and it's less than a foot away  I just can't tell if that hole is the same one I see from the basement or if there's another one in between.  I see the power outlet wiring and cable line coming through.  I was going to drill the hole and find out if I can see the cable from the basement.  If not, then I know I need two holes.... so how do I easily connect the two?  I'm sure a cable guy can do this in 3 minutes.  what do I need to do it?  I don't want to drill the hole until I know I can do it, then I'll buy a proper ethernet plate and make it pretty, or incur the wrath of my wife of course.

 

 

 

Can't follow the geography. Router is upstairs, roughly above the furnace room which is downstairs? Home workspace is downstairs somewhere? You want an ethernet jack on the wall to plug into the router and that goes downstairs somewhere. So you want a CAT 6 terminated in an interior wall upstairs that then goes down through the stud at the base of interior wall and through the sub-flooring and into an area of unfinished ceiling in the basement?  That seems straightforward - I don't follow where two holes come in.

[Biff Mayhem]

1 hour ago, oblong said:

Any suggestions on wiring a cable through a wall?

Mesh WIFI. You'll thank me.

[oblong]

20 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

Can't follow the geography. Router is upstairs, roughly above the furnace room which is downstairs? Home workspace is downstairs somewhere? You want an ethernet jack on the wall to plug into the router and that goes downstairs somewhere. So you want a CAT 6 terminated in an interior wall upstairs that then goes down through the stud at the base of interior wall and through the sub-flooring and into an area of unfinished ceiling in the basement?  That seems straightforward - I don't follow where two holes come in.

Yes.. I don't care what it does once i get it into the basement.  it's unfinished and flows through the floor joists along with the cable coax.

My stairs bisect the laundry room and the furnace room.  The cable line comes in from the outside and goes across my laundry room, along the ceiling in my basement stairwell to a splitter, which has a line into the furnace room and that is what threads out to the wall upstairs to my router.   You can see the photo below, the cable and electric in that outlet are in the same 'hole' if you call it. that other cable going through the floor at the top is to an outlet right behind the outlet in the photo.  The room the router is located is on a slap, you can see the step up to what's the basement in the photo of the outlet.   That other cable going through the floor is to an outlet on the other side of the other photo. 

You can see the larger hole on the right, I can't see enough in that to tell anything but maybe I can use that.... I literally have to just go a few inches if I drill a hole next to the one that is there for the cable line.  

[gehringer_2]

13 minutes ago, Biff Mayhem said:

Mesh WIFI. You'll thank me.

true enough. The latest generation of WIFI is faster than the average home's incoming bandwidth.