Is it really cheaper to do it yourself?
admin on May 18th 2008
About a year ago I finally broke down and bought an HDTV. I really wanted one but I just couldn’t make myself pay the two or three thousand dollars that it was going to take to get one. I ran across a deal on a marked down return at sears and just couldn’t pass it up. It isn’t a large tv by most peoples standards, but a 40″ sony LCD was big enough to put the itch to rest. I payed just over a thousand for the set.
Everyone knows that electronics go down in price rapidly as new ones come out. Nowdays you can get visio’s and a few other brands with bigger screens than my sony for the same price as I got it on markdown for. It really is a beautiful tv though, even if it isn’t the latest model with all the bells and whistles. It does make for one hell of a cool monitor though. I’m actually typing this blog on it right now. 
Anyhow what I wanted to blog about this week was the outrageous price of tv wall mount kits. Now I know after having worked in retail for numerous years that the price of a product has nothing to do with what it is worth. Pricing is directly correlated with how much the average sucker can be made to pay. The guys going out and buying three thousand dollar tv sets obviously have big money they are able to spend. Therefore the accessories cost big money. Even if they are just a stamped steel bracket…
For the last year my big screen lcd tv has set atop a cheap plastic shelf that used to be home to my old small screen tv because I couldn’t bring myself to spend $150 or more on five dollars worth of steel. As mentioned before, I have the computer connected to my tv. I also have a ups system powering both. (Uniterruptable power supply) Yesterday it decided it was time to put in a new battery. The UPS is a flea market special that I payed a dollar or two for so there is no chance I’m going to hunt down a new battery to go inside. Unable to tolerate the beep every three seconds it became time to make a change.
Since I had decided I was going to have to get behind the tv stand and replace the UPS with a surge protector, and I knew the horror of wires and such I was about to enter I decided it was time to go all out and hang the tv from the wall. I still haven’t overcome the unwillingness to pay $150 for a couple of metal bars, so I decided to head on down to the home depot and build my own tv wall mount bracket.
Was it a success? Well I’m typing this now, so you know the tv didn’t fall off the wall and break. Was it cheaper? Maybe, I spent about $30 altogether for all the hardware. The tv sets exactly where I wanted it, and it It looks great. Then why only maybe? Because it took me about fifteen hours from start to finish, counting in the hour or so I spent stopping off to grab a bite to eat. Running back and forth to the hardware store, Drilling holes in the steel, designing it and redesigning it in my head, ect.
Lets do the math here: 15 hours x $12 per hour + $30 in parts = $210. Now I’m sure it would have taken me at least two hours to hang the tv even with a premade mount. So the cost would be more like $175 if I had bought the mount. At the end of the day, this diy project was more expensive to do it myself. I have $120 more in the bank now because I concider it as having paid myself but it really wasn’t cheaper. That is just one more day out of my life I spent working that I could have spent doing something fun.
Overall the most important question is: Was it worth it? This is a firm yes. I’m a glutton for punishment I guess because even though I figure building the mount should be counted as work, at the end of the day and after looking back on it, I was doing something fun.
Just for posterity and to save anyone who stumbles on this article looking for information about building a tv wall mount some searching, here is what I finally settled on that worked and was strong enough. There is a kind of metal beam that is sold that has clips to attach conduit to it. I ended up buying one of those rails and cutting it into four pieces. Two attached to the tv and two bolted to the wall. Then I used the clips that attach to the conduit and two pieces of conduit to attach the rails from the back of the tv to the conduit, to the rails mounted on the wall. Now if this were mounted on the cieling that would have been enough, but since it is mounted on the wall, the tv would slip down the channel if using just the clips. The last part of the design was to drill a hole through all four rails in the same place on the sides. I put a U-bolt through the rail, half inside and half outside. That way as the tv slides down the rail the clips set onto the ubolts.
I would post a picture, but there is no way I have the energy willpower or stupidity left to take the tv off the wall to take a snapshot today. Perhaps that will be a topic for a future blog post. How to build a tv wall mount for under $30…
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