 This evening, as I mentioned, we'll be hearing from Pony. Pony, for a number of years now, has gained a bit of a profile on the resorted community for finding trust-grown TVs on the street or in bins in the neighborhood, taking them home and lovingly repairing them and doing them up and then giving them away to people that need them. And so tonight, Tanya will be talking to us about his experience with fixing 15 or is it 20 TVs now, Pony, I forgot. 15, okay. 15 whole TVs from the street repairing them or doing best to repair them and then giving them out. Tony will talk us through the most common issues that he sees with TVs found in the street and how to deal with those particular problems. And we'll then have kind of a guided triage session between us based on what we've learned in the first half that Tony will lead us through to try and work out what's wrong with a particular TV he's got with him at the moment. And then also be pressed time for questions and answers at the end of the session. Any questions before we get started? No, okay, brilliant. Well, without further ado, I'll hand over to Tony. Tony, take it away. Great, thanks, James. Can everybody hear me okay? You can nod out in the gallery for you, that's good. Well, and thanks very much for giving me the opportunity to do this Skillshare. And I wanna thank the restarters organization in the community of technical volunteers because it's been really helpful to be able to reach out to people when I've been trying to fix TVs and I've really benefited from a lot of the advice and insight from some obviously very clever electrical engineers who spend their time on the forums. But to be really clear about two things, this is not a Skillshare which looks at component level repairs, right? There's nothing I'm gonna be talking about today that presumes that you are an electrical engineer, really, you just got a basic understanding about how electrical things work. And that leads me on to the second point, which is that we are talking about an electrical device, a wind-up toy, and electricity is a dangerous thing, right? So in it, like crystal television, we've got mains voltages, which are dangerous enough. You've also got potentially very, very high voltages. And these voltages can kill you, basically. And if they don't kill you, it's gonna hurt you a lot if you get shocked by those things. Most notably the power supply. A lot of the television is just running on 12 volts or lower than that, but the power supply is stepping the mains voltage. And there are components on that that will remain charged with electricity for some considerable time, even after the TV's turned off. So do take that seriously. And if you're not at all confident working with these things, don't take the back off the TV and start poking around, have a screw driver or a multi-meter because you can do yourself a really bad injury. But the first point I wanna make is that most of the TVs that I've recovered, the majority of the TVs that I've recovered from the street or around kind of communal bin areas and so on have simply been working TVs, right? So, and it continues to surprise me that that's the case that people will dump working liquid crystal televisions with no faults at all in the area close to where they live, possibly just perching it on the wall in front of their house or something. And I suppose what's happening is that people are upgrading to a better television and then they wonder what to do with the old one. And rather than trying to squeeze it into a wheelie bin, they conclude that sitting it next to the bin is the responsible thing to do. So I pick them up and I look at them, I bring them home and have a play with them. And most of the time they work just fine. And I give them away on a website called TrashNothing.com, which many of you will be familiar with. It's a syndication site for things like free go and lambda three cycle and so on, which is the area where I live. And I try to reunite them with people who are basically deserving, maybe not deserving, that's the wrong word. People that actually just genuinely need your television because they don't have one. They're not trying to sell it on eBay or something like that to make a living. They just don't have the money to buy one and therefore they need a TV. So let's get started with the kinds of things that we need to check over when we see a TV just to encourage you really to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in. Do you wanna show us the first slide, James? Just to say we've only got nine slides here. So it's not gonna be a death by PowerPoint experience. First thing we need to do and we are talking about liquid crystal TVs here. You know, the flat panel thin ones, not plasma, not OLED, which you're not gonna find, of course, discarded at this time and not cathode ray tube or the old fashioned kind of TVs. First thing we have to do is take a quick look at the TV. Does it have peace integrity? Is it obviously smashed to pieces? What's the screen condition like? Maybe water has got into the TV that could potentially be a problem. Is there maybe a captive line to come? If the screen is obviously impact damage, then we can still make some use of the set by recycling, harvesting the spare parts and selling them on and on, put on that a little bit later. Take the TV home if it looks basically okay. Give it a bit of a dust down and a brush. And really the thing that's most useful in my experience is just a damp microfiber cloth to wipe the set down, particularly the screen and pay really close attention to the screen condition because if the screen is damaged, there's generally not anything you can do to repair the TV because the screen is really the largest component and the most costly component in the set. And it's the screen that most commonly gets damaged and we'll come on to that in a moment. The obvious question is, how can we be sure? Well, I mean, if you look at the surface of the screen, that's usually a good indication, but it isn't guaranteed conclusive, right? That's why we're in here. Use a torch and the torch is helpful because you can see through the surface of the screen and look for impact damage and explain why that's important in a moment. If the TV has got wet, then leave it to dry out thoroughly. That could take several days. Clearly, water and electricity don't mix and if you turn the television on when it's wet, it will just go kapow and you'll do a lot of damage if you do that. Okay, so we've got a little bit closer. Maybe the thing doesn't look like it right off. Check over the mains cable insulation. Look at the plug wiring, the fuse rating. Very often they have 13 amp fuses for reasons that are not clear to me. It should be 5 amp, probably 3 amp. You can check the continuity of these things if you have a multimeter. If it's not a captive lead, maybe you need to substitute one. You can buy the mini kind of electrical wholesale stall a known good lead and then we can turn on the television, okay? So plug it in. And that's not always as simple as it seems because when TVs are dumped, they often don't have a remote control. So you're looking at this fancy flat panel TV. There are no buttons on it anywhere. You're thinking, what can I do? But usually you will be a button. So do push the button, obviously. But that control panel might be full TV. And again, I'll come back to that in a moment. Try to use a remote control to turn the set on. And if you don't have the right remote control, which you almost certainly won't, then you can get a universal remote control I use at rank one for all. Very, very commonly available. And just program that with the right code for the TV. Even if it doesn't support all of the TV functions, pretty much any code for a Bush TV, for example, will work to the point that it will bring the TV out, stand by, right? So push the power button, turn it on with the remote control. Next slide, James, please. And then what happens next is the obvious question. Did the set power on? Well, mug TVs go through a power on cycle. Sometimes they make a noise, like a little chime. Sometimes not. But pretty soon it's going to display a picture. Usually during that process in LED will illuminate somewhere on television. It might flash a few times, for example. It might even change colour, but ultimately we're expecting to see a picture on the set. If it didn't power on, well, were there any signs of life at all? Again, sound, any kind of picture, flashing any D, the system boots up. If the answer to that question is no, then most likely it's a power supply fault and we can do some basic troubleshooting with a power supply in a TV. If there are some signs of life, maybe a flashing power LED or a start-up chime, maybe sound, but no picture, then you might have a faulty backlight in the TV and you can check for that situation with a bright torch. I'd like to be able to show you that, but in practice it's very difficult because even very bright light won't penetrate very far into the liquid crystal structure, but if you look carefully and you scan the torch across the surface, often you'll see an image moving across the TV screen saying no signal, no input, something like that. Some kind of clue that the television is basically on, but it's just not illuminating the screen. There are two types of backlights, the more modern ones are LED, the older ones are cathode ratio, and the deeper the set, generally it's the cathode ratio backlight. Okay, so maybe the TV does come on and the screen displays okay, everything appears to be fine, leave it for a while, see if it has any faults that might be related to just getting warmer, sometimes that happens. Maybe the TV might spontaneously turn itself off or restart or something. So just basically watch the TV, we can all do that, can't we? Sess it back, tune in to your favourite programme. If there is a picture, but there's some kind of strange pattern on the screen, maybe colour bars, distortion or obvious blunt force trauma impact. And I think the fate awaiting most TVs at least those in the bedrooms of children or homes, children, is a football. I've seen quite a few sets with a notable round impact and then a completely shattered effect, catastrophic impact damage. You can't repair that, but some of the other faults, the kind of weird patterns and you might be able to replace a board in the set, possibly the main board or something called a TECOM board. But those faults are a little bit more difficult to diagnose and you can find useful advice and examples of the sorts of patterns and problems that you might see on YouTube in my experience. So those are the main steps and we're going to take a look inside a set in a moment. James, do you want to show us the next slide? And this is my personal experience. So that looks fine, doesn't it, right? Now, obviously it's not a high resolution photo, but this is a set that I recovered. And I very carefully checked it over and I thought, well, the screen looks absolutely fine, but the TV completely did. So what I did in my naivety was source a secondhand power supply. I fitted the power supply in the TV and excitedly reassembled it all and turned it back on, only to see this next image confront me, which was a bit disappointing, obviously. So that's why the TV was thrown out. And in this particular case, I think it was the impact damage that destroyed the power supply as well. So I repaired one thing, but couldn't repair the screen. And therefore I just took the power supply back out and sold it on. And the TV was recycled. So do check the screen to make sure it's damaged before you spend any money or try to source those spare parts. Can we move on to the next slide, James? Thanks. Okay. So we got to the stage where we think we might need to do some work on the internal component in the set, just reiterating the first point that mains electricity can kill you. In particular, when we take a look at the power supply inside the set, here's one I prepared earlier, in blue theater style. This has been out of a TV for a really, really long time, but I'm still not going to touch the important components. These are the capacitors on the end here, they store electricity, and those are in particular, I'm going to give you very nasty shock, possibly. So we want to be really careful about stuff like that. I'm going to protect the screen, because if you damage the screen, you're going to write the TV off, and you want to make sure you order the right parts. The circuit boards invariably have a sticker with an impossibly small, difficult to read number or series of numbers. It can be hard to find the number that you need, but the websites that sell the parts will give you some guidance on that. Try and find the service manual. Again, I've got a link later on that will help you do so, and the service manuals are great because they have flow charts that explain what to check and where to check it. But yeah, more generally, if we're just taking the back off the TV, that's not a particularly hard thing to do. And my advice is that as you dismantle the TV, you should take photos, and you should be very careful to store the screws in a compartmentalized container, because, one, you'll lose them, particularly if you have a carpeted floor like I do here. And two, they're often different sizes, and you certainly don't want to be putting a very long screw into a hole that's designed for a short screw, because as you screw it through, you can damage a compartment on the other side. When you look at the circuit boards, you'll see that the cable and connector pairs are typically very dissimilar. So not easy to kind of confuse them and plug them into the wrong place, but oftentimes they're very delicate, so you have to be careful when you remove the connectors to remove the circuit board, and of course you also have to be careful not to electrocute yourself in the process. So do make sure that you disconnect the TV from the lines and put the cover back on the TV before you turn the power back on when you've done the repair. Show us the next slide, James. Let's take a quick look at what we find inside a typical TV. Now, this is a photo of the insides of the Samsung TV that I've repaired some time ago, and I'm actually in the process of trying to find a new owner for at the moment. Two parts I've highlighted there on the left-hand side, we see the power supply. And on the right-hand side, the main board sometimes called the logic board. And in the middle, there's a speaker, interestingly, on this set. A couple of things to point out. In the bottom left-hand corner of the power supply, there's what's called a C8 connector, and that's the two-pin figure of a connector for the mains power cable. So if there's any gap in your mind, where the mains power cable goes is the power supply board. And we have a cable at the top of the power supply running in to the top of the TV. That's the backlight feed. And on the right-hand side, we can see another cable that runs across to the main board. So that's carrying low voltage, 12 volts, typically five volts, three volts, to power the main board. There are other components, but these are the two main ones that I want to focus on here. Removing the power supply is not especially difficult. You can see there's a number of connectors. It's screwed on. So it's really not difficult to do, but do be mindful about the risk of electric shock, particularly from those capacitors. Likewise with the main board, not hard to remove, can be a bit fiddly. All of the connectors that you see on the outside of the TV are on the edge normally. You can see here on the bottom and the right-hand side. That's where you find the HDMI cables and so on. So they can be a little bit fiddly. Okay, show us the next slide, James, and let's move on. So with all of that done, the obvious question is, can we apply it to an actually 40 TV? And I do have a 40 TV here in my living room. So I'm going to ask you guys to unmute. Anybody wants to have a go at joining in here or asking any questions about what we've looked at so far? And we're going to try to diagnose the problem in the TV that I have here. So you can stop showing the slides for now, James. And I'll invite our team of engineers to contribute to this particular exercise. I'm going to move over to where the TV is. So just give me a moment to do that. Now, I don't have a broadcast quality camera in my living room. All I've got is my little tablet. So I might need a little bit of fiddling around to get this right. Just bear with me. There's a TV. I'm still here. So there it is on my living room table. And if we look real close, can you see? Is there a little red light? Can anybody see that? Yeah. Can you see it in the corner there? Yeah. I'll just point. So the TV is powered on. And you're just going to have to take my word for it that there doesn't appear to be any obvious damage to the panel on the set. So this does look like a candidate for trying to make TV work. I've plugged it into the mains, got the captive cable here, just running down to the main socket. And as soon as I turn the mains on, the red light comes on. So that looks encouraging, doesn't it? Right? Now, like most modern sets, this is actually quite a fancy ultra-high definition thing from Bush. Not very expensive. There's no obvious power button. There is a control panel around the side. But fortunately, I've got a remote control, which I've programmed with the code for the Bush TV. Does somebody have a question? Yes, thank you. And how do you check? Thank you, Tony. How do you check if there's water inside the television? I mean, you just check it out, but how or humidity? It could be humid as well. Yeah, you're right. You're right. That isn't a good question. But what you tend to find, I mean, obviously, most of the TVs that I've recovered, they've just been on the street near where I live, right? So I know if it's been raining recently, you know, and you walk around the corner and there it is, sitting on the side of the road, it's basically wet. It's just wet. Or you might see what looks like dust from raindrops, you know, or there might be water on the back of the set or something. So what you can do is, if you want to be sure, always just take the back off when it's not plugged in and just make really, really sure that it's dry, basically. Or, eternally, just leave it for a few days, right? Because any water there is going to evaporate. What can sometimes happen is the water is damaged. Yes. Carry on. Sorry. Can you use as well these cans or the humidifiers? You know, these little shashens that they put in food. Yeah, potentially you could do that. I mean, the trick with things like mobile phones is to drop them into a bag of rice, isn't it? Because the rice is dry and it just sucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, correct. I wouldn't do that with a TV. I think what can sometimes happen is the water can get into the backlight area and it can stain the backlight, right? Which is annoying because you have to completely dismantle the TV to get to the... It's like a white reflector, basically, that reflects the light with the TV. So, yeah, I mean, it can be a problem, but it will always dry out given time and then you can begin the repair process and just be cautious on that point. Yeah. Did somebody else have that? Thank you. I think you might have had enough. Oh, okay. Well, look, so I'm going to turn the TV on and be ready, everybody. Here we go. Yes. So, firstly, remote control LED light is starting to flash and we believe it now if... That's just ridiculous, yeah. So this is not what we're supposed to happen. Because it's going to come on, isn't it? Don't worry. It might have touched you, Tony. So, oh, no, yes, no, no, it is. It's actually working. Is that something? I actually... What I was hoping, obviously, was that it wasn't going to come on. But I'm going to improvise my way out of this because this... Your magic hands, yeah? Yeah. This is a TV that was dumped near me. And I think the reason why it was dumped is that it's unreliable, right? So what happens is you can hang it on your wall and it will work fine for a few days. And then you'll turn it on in the evening and it doesn't come on. And you think, what's the matter with it? So, you know, I took it down, put it to one side and I've put it on my table here and I've turned it on. And much to my surprise, it's actually come on. So what I'll do instead is explain how to check. Now, can you see at the top? It's got this thing that says, no channels have been added yet. Please go to the installation. Now, if the backlight on the set hadn't come on, you wouldn't be able to see that, right? But nor would there be an LED on the front here. Okay? So what's actually happened is the TV has gone through its power on process, but there's no backlight and therefore there's no image. Does that make sense? And the only way you can see the image is if you take a really bright torch, I've got an LED headlight, turn it on and put it really close to the screen and then you can just about see it says, no channels have been added yet. You know, you might see an image moving around or you might see a Netflix logo or something. You can see that the image is there. And obviously, if it's tuned into the regular television, you might hear somebody speaking, you know, because it's a TV program that it's tuned into. So this TV has got a problem with the backlight. That's the problem, right? It goes through the power on cycle. Sometimes the backlight comes on as it has today rather awkwardly, but usually the backlight doesn't come on, right? And I've got a live case actually open on the restart as website at the moment, asking people for advice. There is a service manual for this particular set with a series of steps that you can follow and components that you can check. And I've yet to find the time to do that, if I'm honest, but I will get around to it. Laura, you've got your hand up. Sorry, yeah. If the vision of the screen is erratic, could it be as well a connection, a loose connection or a cable which is damaged? Well, I think I'll be honest with you. I have already taken this apart on one occasion. It's a perfectly reasonable presumption to make on your part. It's an LED lighting systems. There's a number of bars that they're like, you know, metal bars that have LEDs periodically placed in series. And, you know, you can get a device for testing the LEDs, but the simple truth is it's either an on or an off thing, right? So either work or they don't work. They are working, right? So, therefore, I think it points to the logic in the power supply, which is actually quite sophisticated in these kind of modern switch mode power supply. I'm going to go and sit down now and turn this off because it's wasting electricity. There we go. Everybody wants an unreliable Bush TV. I'm your man. Yeah. Right. So that wasn't quite what was supposed to happen. So we just looked at some really simple troubleshooting steps. And I just want to emphasize that most of the time, the problems are really simple. James, do you want to take us on to the last couple of slides? And then we've got time for some questions and general discussion. OK. So some other possibilities in a lot of the TVs that I've found are really, really old and they don't decode a modern digital video broadcast, the DVB broadcasting. I've long since used Chromecast myself because I don't actually have a TV feed here in the flat. So that's mainly how I watch TV. But there are lots of devices that we can use. Amazon Fire Stick Rocky, the older 3D decoders are almost, well, they're certainly very cheap. I mean, I actually got one from FreeCycle, Trash Nothing for a TV that I wanted to repurpose. And all of these devices plug them into a HDMI socket on the TV and you've basically created a smart TV. So again, we don't need to throw that old set into a landfill. Possibly even use a TV with a games console, one of the sets that I gave away recently. So I was thrilled to give a TV to his children so they could play with their PlayStation and stop bothering Mum and Dad who wanted to watch the TV, obviously. Peter, should have a question. Yeah. Thanks, Tony. Could you use it as a second screen for a PC or a laptop? Good question. Yeah. So a lot of TVs do have what's it called a D-sub, isn't it? It's a 15-pin VGA connector on the back. And they can be quite good as computer monitors. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And they're huge, obviously. So they're a bit like, whoa, if you're trying to work on it. But potentially, yes, you could use one. And obviously, you get smaller TVs. So a lot of the TVs that I've recovered have been 19 inch or 20 inch. And they do work perfectly as monitors. Yeah, so you could certainly do that as well. Excellent, thank you. OK, so another alternative to throwing the thing in the bin. People, instance summary, then most of the discarded TVs that I found work absolutely fine. Even if they don't work, then you can often swap apart. And if the screen's damaged, you can harvest the parts. And somebody else can reuse them. I've sold quite a few parts on eBay. And what I do is gift the proceeds of the sale to the restart as charity, which has, you know, you can do that kind of gifting process on eBay quite straightforwardly when you list things. Just to re-emphasize, mains electricity can kill you. So if you're not confident, don't take the back cover off in the first place. Always make sure you disconnect the TV from the mains before you start dismantling it. And be especially careful not to touch the components, particularly on the mains power supply when you're dismantling the set, even hours, days after it's been disconnected. You don't need thousands of pounds worth of tools. That might refine the cloth. I'm going to say, great torch. I've got an old head torch here that I use. Really very effective for examining the TV. Universal remote control, I think is essential because you're never going to get a remote with the set. Just a few basic screwdrivers. And for the ambitious multimeter, again, doesn't have to be very sophisticated. You just need to be able to check for continuity. It's helpful if you can measure voltages including mains voltages. There's a link there for service manuals. Sometimes you can find them on the manufacturer's website. Spare parts. eBay is a great source for spare parts because, again, people are harvesting TV components. And EMOS, I found to be a very helpful supplier. They even go as far as helping you identify where to find the part on specific boards for specific models of TV. So you can be really sure that you're getting the right part. And that's our mantra, folks, isn't it? Reduce. Keep using the thing. Repair it if it goes wrong. Reuse it if it can't be a TV anymore. Do something else with it. And if the TV really is busted because somebody's kicked the football into it, then you can recycle those components. And as I say, my experience is really very little effort over a number of years. I've saved quite a few TVs from landfill. People who really needed a TV and didn't have the money to buy one have benefited from that work. And I don't know how many kilos of carbon dioxide it saved, but it's quite a lot. And there's a lot of nasty stuff that hasn't gone into some of the dismantled by children in a country far away for no money poisoned. So I hope you found that useful. I hope that when you see these things near you, or maybe if you want to get involved helping somebody that's got a problem, you'll feel involved and to have a go. And I hope that if you're more experienced than me, you'll help me out. You'll help me fix this bush. It's walking already. Yeah, but it won't be for long. I'll tell you. I'll tell you not. Peaceful. Have a great evening. Yeah, thanks, James. Try and lower my hand if I can click on it. Oh, look, there we are. Yeah, it's interesting. You give a reference to manualslib.com because every time you're looking for a menu and I've looked for boilers and things, that always comes up. I'm always very wary about clicking on that. So I thought it was a bit of a spam type thing, but you've used it and you think it's OK. Just to be clear, what I normally do is search for the detailed kind of technical model number of the TV. It's no good just searching for Samsung, looking for crystal TV. Obviously that isn't going to get you anywhere. But if you just use your favorite internet search engine, I use DuckDuckGo because Google will bubble you, obviously that's always a problem. And oftentimes it will take you to that particular website. Sometimes you can find one on the manufacturer's website. But certainly I've had good results with them. OK, thank you. That's a question, sorry. Laura, sorry. Yeah, sorry. I may be a bit confused because the last time I opened the television it was one of these Caddo tubes, you know, just 30 years ago. They were fantastic, very obvious. And computers. How about anti-static electricity? Good question. You have to look at that as well with the modern TVs. Yeah, so I think the answer to that is potentially yes. When you look at certainly smart TVs like this Bush one, by the way, this Bush is largely an empty box. And if you're having difficulty trying to find the parts for these really cheap TVs like Bush and Alba, they're actually based on components from a company called Vestel, V-E-S-T-E-L. So that can be the place to go to to find the menus. But to answer your question, Laura, the smart TVs will often have, you know, they're basically a computer, right? So they've got RAM and RAM is state sensitive. So I think the answer is yes, you need to be careful. Yeah, you want to be terrain, you know, putting on your anti-static strap and plugging it in and making sure you know. Yeah, yeah, use a mat. You can be touching us with the table, can you? You touch the one with the other hand. These need to be something that's earthed. So generally speaking, I mean, it can help if you touch something that's made for sure. But when you look at computer engineers doing it, they use a conducted mat, don't they? They plug that into the mat, not into the mat. Rubber shoes as well, isn't it? It's an earth connector, isn't it? And then they put a rubber, put a bunch of cable on and they put it on their wrist and attach that to the mat. So you're draining away all the static electricity. So yes, you're right. But the oldest sets, not so much, you know, my understanding is that it's really a few semiconductor components that are static sensitive. Okay, and in any case, does the electricity build up? I mean, if the TV has been outside for several days, unless it has been working, it wouldn't have any electricity on it, wouldn't it? So that's right. Yeah, so capacitors do discharge over time. There'll be somebody here that's more knowledgeable than me about that, I'm sure. But they do discharge over time, definitely. And therefore it gets progressively safer to work on. You can discharge the capacitors yourself. That's a risky thing to do, obviously. And you can buy a device that will do it safely. Which is important when you're working with switch mode power supplies, because they have lots of other kind of logic and components on them. And if you just brutally kind of discharge the electricity, you can actually damage the power supply in the process, even if it's working in the first instance. The other thing I'd say is that it's quite common to get people in the restart as community asking you to post photos of the board and they want to look at the capacitors and so on. And say, oh, it's that one there that needs to be changed. Well, this isn't very straightforward to do, frankly. You need to be soldering gun and all that kind of stuff. And again, it's risky because it might have a charge and blah, blah, blah. I've never actually done that myself. I'll be honest with you. I've always just said, look, if you think it's the power supply, I'm going to buy another one for a five. Basically from eBay and I'm going to try it. If it works, I'm going to put this in my pile of broken electronics. And one day I'm going to take you all round to the councils. We sort of recycling points and that you please recycle all of this stuff. Now a lot of people I know will probably write hate mail to me now as a consequence of that. But I don't have the skills to do those kinds of repairs. And it's just risky. And the more modern stuff, I mean, you take a Sony TV apart. It's a work of art, really. Very elegant, very sophisticated design. And they've got almost no discrete components at all. So they're just tiny, tiny little resistors and capacitors. And you can barely see them. You almost need a microscope to try to work on the thing. And quite how you desolder them. They're not made to be repaired. Right? I mean, this was made to be repaired. Isn't that in opsoilants? They are built in opsoilants. Is there a new law? Built by robots as well. So that's why you can't tell them. The cars. Built by robots, yeah. Isn't there a new law that imposes that every single new electronic has to be, not be made in opsoilants. So they have to be, the right to repair, I think it was. Well, there's a discussion about that now when I think other people on the call today will be more knowledgeable than me about that. But my understanding is that the European Parliament has passed some kind of measure. The Council of Ministers need to talk about implementing it. There's a big round of consultation with all the manufacturers, you know, and they all try to resist to varying degrees, obviously. But at least in principle, I think there is agreement. And there'll be rules that say they have to make parts available for like 10 years and potentially people should be able to fix things themselves, you know, get hold of the name themselves. So that's a good thing, definitely. But not straightforward. I know. Probably a little bit easier with a TV than a iPhone 12. Yeah. You can take it apart. Yeah, it used to be a lot easier, wasn't it, just to put things apart and see all the parts and put them together. Now it's just, as you say, work of art and touchable. Very confusing. I didn't stray into the kind of thoughts that you get with liquid crystal panels. There's a lot of stuff on YouTube about that. They're impossible to repair. I mean, just can't repair them yet. But diagnosing them is a challenge. And the last kind of step in the chain is a very, very, very delicate flat ribbon cables that plug into the kind of edge of the liquid crystal panel. The connectors are really fiddly and delicate. And it's just absolutely nerve-wracking, you know, working with that stuff. And it's so easy to damage it and make it worse. If you don't know what you're doing. But most of the problems I've come across have been 40-pound supplies. I've had a couple of TVs with a 40 mainboard. And I tried a T-con board, but no one said they didn't fix it once. So the Sony, they've been a couple of liquid crystal panel faults, ultimately, which have not been repairable. And the rest of them have been catastrophic panel damage, you know, where someone's picked the football into their basis. And that's it, game over. Is it worth it buying a screen? No, never. Is it worth it repairing the screen? So what happens is the screen gets damaged and people take all the other components out and then recycle the rest. If you can't repair them, the manufacturing yield of liquid crystal screens is actually quite low. So when people think these TVs are some kind of environmental miracle realities, they're not. Because a lot of the panels that get made just get thrown away and because they've got faults, you know, the manufacturing stage. So, no, there's just nothing you can do. Thank you. You can move screen and then it's right off. I'm in very briefly on that right repair point. And I think the TV is the most pertinent thing to know at the moment is that you did pass some legislation a couple of years ago that pertains to TVs and it mandates a few things, including that their parts have to be made available for 10 years, for example, for TVs and a few other categories of consumer product. It's a good start, but the law itself is quite limited. I'll post a link in the chat to a brief article, but I'll write it down in a bit more detail. It applies in the UK as well. The UK enacted that legislation in the UK in the last year, I believe. I'll mention a couple that's really helpful, James, and that's a very positive step forward, isn't it? And I think one of the great things about restart is as a campaigning charity is that all of that work is ongoing and there's a lot of pressure that's applied, but at the same time there's a practical edge to what the charity does and organises. James did a lot of good work in getting people involved in repair work. I've been along to a few restart parties. I think they called for events prior to COVID lockdown and they were always tremendous fun. I look forward to going back to those in the future. People don't typically bring TVs to them, I would say. It's mostly laptops and phones and tablets and just other toasters. Everybody hates toasters, don't they? They're always going wrong. So a couple of other quick points. Sometimes TVs, I didn't put this on the slides, sometimes they get discarded because of something really very simple. I was embarrassed to have one a little while ago which had a non-responsive control panel and it turned out the child lock was turned on. And it's the kind of thing you can only get out with remote control when you get into the menus and sort of play around with this and that was really embarrassing. And I had another one, but when you turned it on the screen just went red, green, blue. Red, green, blue. And it just kept cycling through the primary colours over and over and over. And I thought this is really weird. And it turned out that it was just stuck in an engineering test mode. So simply using a remote control, I programmed the remote control. As soon as you push the menu button, the TV just came on. Somehow it got stuck in this engineering mode and you could just probably a child sat on the remote control with the exact combination to trigger the engineering mode. So don't discount the simple stuff and the weird things because I've wasted quite a lot of my time messing around, changing components because I've overlooked something very simple. Put the thing, there's often got like a factory reset and just go reset it to its factory settings. And that can help if someone's turned the brightness and the contrast all the way down. It doesn't look like it. There's a picture. There's no area or something. All those kinds of simple things. Do take them first. I had a set where I actually went as far as changing the power supply and the main board and I faffed around a bit. You know, people on the restarters communicated, oh, it must be this component. Wasted days and days and days and it turned out that it was the control panel that was faulty, right? So you could push the on button as much as you like. It would never come on. But if you used the remote control, it just came on straight away. Oh, my God. Tony, what about faults with remote controls? I'm sorry? What about faults with remote controls? That's your handle bit. Yeah, I mean, I guess you're right. So you could have a problem with the remote control equally, couldn't you? So there's a sense on the set that looks for those signals. But the remote itself might be faulty. I mean, I've been using this programmable one. So it doesn't really get a lot of use. But yeah, certainly. Delighted the remote control. Delighted the remote control as well. Yeah, so it could be a problem with the remote. Yeah. I had one where just a couple of buttons just stopped working, like the volume control or the program changer. And we had a virgin cable. And they just provide a brand new remote control for each other. I still got the old one, but not played around with it yet. Yeah. So yeah, certainly always check those simple things. So if you've got alternatives, use a different remote. What I usually do is I find the kind of cheap ones that you can buy an eBay for a fiver when I give the sets away. So I can just say to people, look, there's the remote. And just it'll work fine. It's not the original one, but it'll work fine. The last point is, stands are often missing. So two things about that really, you could obviously get the manufacturer's stand. They're very expensive, typically. eBay and other companies will sell stands that are designed to bolt onto the four holes on the back of the TV. And they can be quite, quite elegant looking things. They're usually very cheap. And that way you can find another stand for the TV. Obviously it's not practical just to have the thing leaning up against the wall and mounting them on a wall isn't entirely straightforward. You can buy a bracket and drill the wall and all the rest of it. So I think on a couple of occasions I bought cheap stands just so that people could have them sitting in the living room on a table. So that's something to think about. There we are. So, yeah, that's pretty much all I got to say about fixing TVs, folks. Anybody got any other questions or observations, any war stories that they want to share? A lot of this advice to computer monitors, of course, as well, because computer monitors, if anything, are quite a bit simpler than TVs. And they are based on the same functional electronics, same kinds of screens and so on. So a few of the 15 that I prefer to earlier were actually computer monitors. So how much can you dismantle a TV and how can you make sure that when you are selling them on eBay, those are working because it's a bit touch and go, isn't it? So can you just repeat the question? Sorry, yes. How do you know if you have a TV and you are just putting the parts aside to sell them, how can you make sure that the parts you are selling are working, are functional? Well, again, that's a good question. It's a logical inference, really. So, I mean, if you go back to the slide that I showed you earlier, it's a Shiba-Rexer TV. Once the screen comes on, even if it's got catastrophic panel damage, and you can see it's been punched or something like that, what you usually see is the BBC, whether man or woman behind. And in reality, the TV is working fine. You can change the channel. You can bring up the menus. You can hear the sound. Actually, it's all fine. It's just a screen that's ruined, right? So that's good enough to say the power supply is OK, the main board is OK, speakers are OK, et cetera, and then you can dismantle it. Obviously, if the thing is completely dead, then you've got a problem, haven't you? You can't know if the main board is OK and so on. And it would be a bit dishonest, I think, to list the same. It's working. What you could say, what you could say, you could honestly describe it and say, you know, there's no sign of life at all. The panel's damaged, et cetera. So I am giving this away for spares or parts, and somebody with a bit more time and a bit less money might want to just... They've got the exact model that's faulty. They might want to try a few kind of speculative transplants to see if they get the set working that way. But you're right. You do need to think about that quite carefully. I'm not going to mislead people, particularly if you're selling things on eBay because you'll get bad feedback. Yeah, yeah. And the thing is as well, if we repair something, then if they do the PAT test, can it pass it? I mean, if we have fixed it properly, because, for instance, putting a... I've got a toaster, I've burnt the whole of the cable. Even if I change that, that is not going to pass any PAT, isn't it? The test. I'm glad you mentioned PAT test. I'll be honest with you, I'm not 100% sure what a PAT test is. I don't have a PAT tester. My understanding is that restart events, there's usually somebody with a PAT tester who wants to do a test if maybe your toaster's been repaired and someone wants to take it away. So it's a device that tests a variety of electrical properties of the device to make sure it's not earthed or it is earthed and blah, blah, blah. I don't have one, I've never used one. But what I can say is that any TV that leaves here doesn't have live sparking wires poking out the back. The insulation is fine on the cable. No need to test it. It works, doesn't it? Fundamentally, it's got the right fuse in it. No, I was just wondering, if you sell something that you have repaired yourself on eBay, for instance, then if anything happens, if anyone has got an accident, you are liable for it. That's an interesting question. I've not really thought about the... What I'm doing, of course, is giving people things. I'm using a website called Crash Nothing. I'm very honest with people. I've found this TV, close to where I live. I've tested it. It seems to work okay. I'm sure the website itself will have a disclaimer anyway. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's up to you to do with it. Absolutely, yeah. Okay, thank you. Cheers. Hey, I think we're actually coming to the end of our time here. Any last-minute burning questions for Tony before we call it a night? No? Tony, if it helps, I just did some back-of-the-nap calculations and worked out that for 15 BVs, it would take potentially saved around four metric tons of CO2 equivalent. Well done. Congratulations. That's quite a lot of carbon dioxide, isn't it? It's called embodied CO2, isn't it? I know TVs are quite high up there. Maybe not as bad as laptops, but they're pretty bad. Yeah. Everyone is getting rid of them as well. There's going to be a lot of things in the streets, unfortunately. Sorry, I think there was a question. Peter, I think was asking. No, no, no. I'll scratch my ear, I think. Okay, me too. Okay, well, thank you so much, everybody, for coming. I hope this has been informative. Thank you very much. And a huge thank you to Tony for sharing your experience, your knowledge with us this evening. We've done a huge amount. So that was really, really helpful, really enjoyable. So thank you very much. Yeah, thanks so much. Thank you, James, as well. Thank you, very kind. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Happy repairing. I was late. Thank you. Bye-bye.