Saturday, December 1, 2012

Cable to Nowhere

There's always a few surprises when you buy a house "as is" even if you have it inspected.  Today we found a surprise with the cable in the master bedroom.

Both Jan and I like to watch TV in bed at night (probably like most of the population) however the Garfield house did not have an extra TV. So we purchased a 39" HDTV and wall mount during black friday and had it shipped.  In the meantime she picked up a DTA converter box from the cable company in the event we needed it.

The TV showed up last Friday and I proceeded to hook it up after dinner.  There was a cable outlet and power plug behind the dresser so I it was fairly easy to hook up.  Problem was there was no signal so I called Comcast to work through the issue.  30 minutes later I hung up in fruistration and decided to test the TV out on the cable in the living room.  It worked great!

That's when I realized the cable guy mentioned that he disconnected a splitter when he hooked up the TVin the living room.  Saturday after finsihing up some trim work I decided to hunt down the splitter and reconnect it. After trying three different wires running to who knows where on the side of the hosue I decided to check the cable outlets.  That's where I found the problem.


The previous owner pulled a fast one. There was a nice cable box and even cable connected to the box but when I pulled on the cable this came right out of the box.  Same thing in the other room.   Both outlets had about a foot of cable jammed into the wall to give the appearance there was acutal cable!  The wire was just cut off and attached to nothing in the wall.

Guess I'll need to add to the list of things to do now and run some cable through the attic and to the outlet.  Works never done and at least this will be an easy fix.  (hopefully)

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