How to make a TV appear broken ...without breaking it

September 19, 2012 9:38 AM

We have a basic Toshiba LCD HDTV (2 yrs old). I want to disable it for the next six weeks so no one can use it. I.E. it needs to appear as if it is broken, but it really isn't. I need to make sure all plugged in peripherals (DVD, Wii, AppleTV, antennae, and cable TV) cannot be viewed. Any ideas?
posted by apennington to technology (28 answers total)

I'd hunt for an LCD-safe sticker of a cracked screen. Somebody probably makes them, if only as a gag for smartphones. Put it on the TV, duct tape over the power button, hide the remote.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 9:42 AM on September 19, 2012

Have the power turned off to the home.

If that is unworkable, cut the circuit breaker feeding that room for 6 weeks.
posted by inturnaround at 9:43 AM on September 19, 2012

Are you willing to spend a couple bucks? Then just buy some crazy glue or sugru or something, cut the power cord, glue or sugru it back together, but make sure there's a thick enough layer between both ends so no current can flow(maybe use some electrical tape as well?), and then in 6 weeks just buy a new power cord.
posted by Grither at 9:43 AM on September 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

If you trust yourself with electricity, kill the breaker to the socket it uses, and unwire the electrical socket it users. Take pictures as you go, so you can re-do it. Use cheap wirenuts to protect the loose ends.

And come on, you've got to tell us why you're doing this. Please?
posted by Sunburnt at 9:46 AM on September 19, 2012 [7 favorites]

Easier yet would be to remove the wall plate on the outlet remove (and cap) the wires at the outlet that the TV is plugged into, put the plate back on. In six weeks, rewire it.
posted by HuronBob at 9:46 AM on September 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

well, friggin' jinx
posted by HuronBob at 9:47 AM on September 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

Instead of "breaking" it, could you "steal" it and give it to someone else to hang on to for a few weeks?
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:47 AM on September 19, 2012

Could you just remove the electric outlet from the wall and disconnect the wires and put the cover back on. It would only be a few minute job to reconnect it when you get home.

And as I am typing that I see everyone else is suggesting it too.
posted by wwax at 9:48 AM on September 19, 2012

Just cut the plug off the end of the power cord. It's a 10 minute project to reattach it later. Do the cutting after it is unplugged.
posted by COD at 9:49 AM on September 19, 2012

If you disable the power outlet somebody can just move the TV. If faced with a TV with no power at all, the first thing I would do is try a different outlet.
posted by COD at 9:50 AM on September 19, 2012 [3 favorites]

Unplug it and wrap the power plug with duct tape.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:51 AM on September 19, 2012

Okay we did this with someone's iMac once. Get some paper, like Pantone paper, the same color as the screen when it is turned off. Spraymount clear mylar to it. Cut it to the screen size and spraymount it to the surface (hopefully it's glass). When the tv is turned on, the screen will still look dark.

Fun times.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 10:07 AM on September 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

Modify the arduino TV-B-Gone to fire every 20 seconds, hide it in the TV room?

http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-TV-B-Gone/
posted by RobotHero at 10:12 AM on September 19, 2012 [3 favorites]

Remove the TV when everyone is out and claim that you had to ship it back to a Toshiba repair center for major repairs and it will take them a few weeks to troubleshoot and fix it. In the meantime, place the TV into a professional locked storage unit or with one of your trusted workmates that doesn't live in your neighborhood.
posted by plokent at 10:12 AM on September 19, 2012 [2 favorites]

If you simply disconnect the outlet, you may lose power to any outlet or lights that are chained to it. You will have to use wire nuts to join the sets of wires.

Also, not sure who you are trying to fool, but it's fairly easy to tell if an outlet is not working.
posted by wongcorgi at 10:13 AM on September 19, 2012

The problem with disabling the outlet or power cord is they can easily be swapped. `What you want to do is disable the screen. This will require opening the unit and disconnecting one or more of the wires that go from the screen to the various boards in the TV. Everything else will "work"- the remote, possibly even the sound will still work, but the screen will always be blank.
posted by Gungho at 10:31 AM on September 19, 2012

As long as the television is sitting there, it can be made to work if the person(s) are willing to spend money on new cables, spend time diagnosing, or what-have-you.

So, your goal is to make them believe that the television is broken, in a way that strongly disinclines them to do the necessary troubleshooting/spend the necessary money...but also that doesn't make you look like a jerk if they discover the television actually works.

Oh, and you don't want to mess around with electricity, because that's potentially dangerous.

The solution, then, is to create a set of "disabled" video/audio connection cables. Buy a second set of cables and sabotage them in non-obvious ways: for analog cables, cut/detach center leads on both ends, and for digital cables, cut or bend pins so that they don't make contact. Make sure the original set of cords is not in the house for comparison.

As an adjunct to this effort, make sure the remote control does not work. The easiest way? Take the original remotes from the house, leave behind a "universal" remote that isn't programmed for the components, but has batteries so it lights up.

Just consider how much time the person(s) will spend fighting these issues, and how frustrated and disappointed they'll be, and at least consider telling them that the TV is broken, so that they won't be calling you for assistance over and over until they give up.
posted by davejay at 10:47 AM on September 19, 2012 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure about this TV specifically, but I've found that many electronic devices contain one or two fairly obvious, replaceable high-voltage fuses in the power supply. If you're confident enough, you could open the case, pluck out any fuses you see, and keep them somewhere safe. If there are no fuses, there may be some other obvious mains-voltage connection that can be temporarily broken. The TV will be dead to the world.

I have often done the reverse of this, i.e. opening up a case to check and replace blown fuses when an appliance has unexpectedly died. Sometimes there will be an internal metal case for the power supply, often festooned with "WARNING: no user servicable parts inside" and other such lies.

Standard disclaimer: electricity can be dangerous. Don't do this if you're not confident that you can do it safely.
posted by pont at 10:55 AM on September 19, 2012

If you don't mind opening the case, the IR sensor and side panel buttons can most likely be easily disconnected from the main board. They're not soldered in place or anything, it's just a plug. If it's anything like my one year old Toshiba which I had to de-case it's super easy to get apart, but there are lots and lots of screws.
posted by wierdo at 2:15 PM on September 19, 2012

Who's the enemy here? That would help a lot with the level of expertise we need to counter against. If it's a young kid simply unplugging it or putting a piece of electrical tape over the IR receiver might be enough. If it's a teenager with Internet access left alone for 6 weeks... well the only thing to do is to remove it from the house. "For service" as plokent suggested upthread. (Which I think is the best idea. No chance of killing yourself with mains current and no permanent damage to the TV. And also there's veracity with having it magically work again after the 6 weeks are up.)

I initially liked the "remove the outlet from the circuit" suggestions above, but I'm guessing all the other peripherals are plugged into the same outlet via an outlet strip, so either it wouldn't meet your criteria or if the peripheral's strip was still active it would be trivial to just plu the TV in there.

Literally cutting the cord is a decent option but can be countered with $1.79 of parts from the hardware store. Depends if your enemy is willing and able to do that.

Most TVs have parental controls that will lock out channels and functions without the correct password. You could use this. It wouldn't meet the "looks broken" criteria, but is at least honest.
posted by Ookseer at 2:55 PM on September 19, 2012

Thank you all for the excellent ideas! I'm going to try many of these over the next several days and will reply back once we have a working solution!

The reason why? We have a houseguest (for six more weeks) who is broke, unemployed, suffering from depression and substance abuse, and watching a *LOT* of TV (courtesy our fancy TV-watching setup). Her family & close friends are putting plans in place to help get her professional treatment. And one piece of advice (from the counselor they are working with) is to stop her from watching so much TV, as it serves in this case as a distraction from reality. She gets very defensive and angry when we ask her to turn off the TV, so it would be great to deflect her anger if the TV were to go "on the fritz". She's not that technically savvy; she would definitely try a different power outlet, but beyond that, I can't guess.

Ironically, my husband and I have lost interest in watching TV (at least for now) just through observing our houseguest's TV obsession.
posted by apennington at 4:36 PM on September 19, 2012

If you're comfortable opening the TV you could use these instructions to locate the power board and disconnect it.
posted by O9scar at 5:18 PM on September 19, 2012

It's easy enough to make a power cord that doesn't work and it'll be 100% reversible if your power cord isn't integral with the TV.

1. Buy spare cord
2. Buy replacement cord end
3. Cut end off of replacement cord
4. Mechanically attach the cord end to the cord but neglect to hook it up electrically. IE: don't strip any wires and don't put them under the screws of the cord end
5. Replace working cord with your ringer and hide the original
6. Wait six weeks
7. Swap the cords back

This will only work if the guest won't think about swapping cords (they are pretty standard). Making a big production out of trying to fix it might help.
posted by Mitheral at 5:30 PM on September 19, 2012

I was in agreement with many of the ideas above until I read your reasoning.

Is there a particular reason why you're willing to lie to this person? This is your house, you are offering it to your guest for a considerable period of time.

'Sorry, we're turning the TV off because it's a little distracting to us now, and we're trying to help you with some recommendations from your counselor.' If she doesn't like it, and gets defensive and angry? Tough shit. There's the door, you're welcome to go live somewhere where you can watch TV. You're trying to help, it's her choice but as long as she's living pro bono under your roof, she plays by your rules, depression or not.

If she has any brains at all, and if her counselor has mentioned TV viewing to her in any capacity, she will very quickly see through the 'we just don't feel like fixing the TV' ruse, and you will have one more negative thing to deal with.

To at least provide an answer to your question without going off on a tangent: Most of the above methods are viable; I would unplug it, crack it open and see if there's any obvious fuses or cables you can easily disconnect.

Did the counselor specifically mention TV usage? Are all the other entertainment options (DVD, Wii) also a concern? If it was only TV, depending on what your source is, you could 'break' reception by planting something over your satellite dish receiver, or disconnecting the cable near where it comes into your house. Or, call your provider and see if they can suspend your service for 6 weeks. If the other items are also of a concern though, I think you have no other option than to dig into the guts of the unit if you really want it to look like an accident / unintentional.

Sorry, I'm trying not to turn this into 'how to deal with this person' because that's not what you asked. I just had to raise that red flag when you provided the details (and than you for doing so, I'm sure I was not alone among the curious!). I've dealt with a houseguest with the exact conditions you specify, and your solution would absolutely not have ended positively.
posted by SquidLips at 5:35 PM on September 19, 2012 [3 favorites]

I think the above posts have the hardware side more or less covered; on the software end, you can probably put a child lock on all the channels with a password. It'll be buried in your options, probably "Security" or "Parental Controls". It's even possible to just restrict the programming to kids/educational stuff, which would make a great graduation from whatever soap operas and reality programs that she's watching now. As far as making it sound 'broken', just mumble something about shoddy firmware and lazy programmers.

Though I'd otherwise agree with the above comment about honesty in most other situations, if she's recovering from substance abuse it's hard to expect her to be the sane, rational person that you know is buried underneath all of those addiction pathways. If she's getting help soon, then it's really not up to you to shoulder the emotional burden of dealing with her.
posted by dubusadus at 6:54 AM on September 20, 2012

After reading the situation I think I agree that setting up the password feature on the TV is a better solution.
posted by COD at 7:16 AM on September 20, 2012

Hello. Thank you all for your wonderful answers. They are very clever & great and may work in some situations in the future where for whatever reasons I cannot just simply ask people to jsut turn off the TV (which would be default choice).

Here's what happened: (a) I blocked the IP address of my Apple TV device (which provides Netflix too) on my wireless router. Netflix/AppleTV stopped working (Failure to access Internet); (b) I loosened the cable TV cord at a hard-to-find junction in the basement, resulting in a grainy picture. It's not as effective as cutting the cables, but it discourages long-term TV watching. The DVD player still works, but she doesn't have enough DVDs to stay awake all night watching movies.

This approach would not work for most people. However, my husband had noticed a pattern where our houseguest has broken a number of items in our home over the past 4+ months and has never mentioned it or apologized. She admits to it only if I ask her about it. The same in this case: although she regularly checks to see if the TV is working (the remotes move around), she has never raised the issue and asked for help getting it fixed.

Because the counselor suggested keeping communications positive and non-accusatory, I didn't confront her directly to ask her to quit watching TV. (She gets uber-defensive and angry.) Also, she isn't in treatment yet; this was from a set of suggestions by the counselor who is helping her family prepare for an intervention. The intervention is scheduled for Thursday morning; I do hope it goes well and she agrees to seek treatment.
posted by apennington at 9:13 AM on October 2, 2012

What kind of cable tv do you have? Do the set top boxes have any kind of removable card in them? If I pull the access cards from my DirecTV boxes, they stop working.

How technically adept is this person? You could insert a coax splitter w/a frequency filter that would knock out the signal when you attach the cable to the wrong output.

You might also call your cableco and see if they can just temporarily disable your account from their end while you're gone (although I'd be worried about headaches with this).

Just noticed I missed the date on this while browsing! OP arrived at a good solution, but pulling access cards in certain rooms has worked for us w/less familiar housesitters.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:13 AM on October 7, 2012