Can anyone recommend a TV repair person?

I have a fairly new, out of warranty, 43" LED TV that is faulty. I know what the problem is, I just can’t seem to get any response from the manufacturer for spare parts. I’m guessing a TV repair person would have routes into parts departments, etc…

Ta

This guy:

He doesn’t speak much English. I’d call and make an appointment. Repairing and selling TVs is all he does and the shop is packed with TVs and parts. It’s a good place to get a TV as well.

Thanks a lot! That sounds just like the place I need and I live in Zhonghe, bonus!

I visited this shop today. I definitely wouldn’t recommend him. Almost immediately he tried to rip me off. He knows English words like: Broken, Replace and No Guarantee. He pointed at random components on the PCB and said replace, replace, replace. Having an Electronics Degree and 20 years+ in R & D, I kinda know a thing or two about these things and more than enough to know what the guy was telling me was complete bollocks. I wouldn’t trust him to change a light bulb.

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Well in my experience, most repair shops don’t do any actual repair (as in replace broken component or rework a PCB).

I think for most people it’s too much work, and for the amount of work it takes to rework a PCB it’s simpler to just tell the customer to buy a new unit, as the cost to rework anything, even something relatively simple (often these SMD require special equipment and skills for rework) they would have to charge almost the cost of a TV to fix it.

Like I fixed a cordless mini vacuum for my neighbor. The battery basically died. It’s one of those non-removable lithium ion batteries, that is a bunch of 18650 batteries soldered together into a pack and with integrated circuits (which is the brains of the vacuum cleaner) and heat shrinked together. To fix the unit I had to buy 6 18650 batteries (costs about 600, which the neighbor paid), and hours of labor to carefully disassemble the pack, resolder the new pack into the right configuration, remove the control board, solder the control board onto the new pack, somehow pack everything together, reassemble the whole unit and test it (it worked great, in fact better than stock after the rework). This is at least 3 hours of labor for me (not to mention danger of battery exploding if a mistake were made) and a shop is probably going to charge something like 2000nt plus parts. The vacuum cleaner is 6000nt new. Ask yourself, would you pay half the cost of a vacuum to fix a dead battery?

So unfortunately, repair shops, especially TV, simply doesn’t fix anything but just tells customers to buy new if it’s out of warranty. They’re simply running an electronic stores disguised as a repair shop. A lot of music stores unfortunately are like this too, which is why people like me exist.

By the way if your problem is a component on a PCB that is bad (for example bad chip) you would probably get further along if you take the PCB out, identify the bad component, buy the bad component, and go to the guanhua underground market and ask them to solder it. Don’t expect a “TV repair shop” to do all that for you.

I never went to the shop with the expectation of them repairing the faulty board. I went there to see if he could get a replacement. Even if I had the tools to replace the faulty component, there would be virtually no prospect of me finding a replacement in the Guanhua market as most modern LSI chips are proprietory. I’ll never buy another thing from TECO, this I’m sure of. Their customer service is shockingly bad and their website has no email address for Taiwan.

Replacement board is even worse. Don’t expect to find them at all. The only way you’ll ever get those parts is to find another TV and cannibalize it.

I’m betting most manufacturers don’t even have a parts department that sells to the public anymore. There is probably even agreements that the manufacturer are not allowed to sell those parts to anyone else at all.

@Nobby Did he quote you a price for the repair? I bought a TV there after I tried to fix mine myself. He said he’d look at it but I knew I’d trashed it trying to fix something minor.

Yes, he pointed at 3 random capacitors that he would replace for the princely sum of 500ntd but offered no guarantee that it would work. He wasn’t basing his assessment on previous experience either as he couldn’t identify what brand of tv the board was from. We established this later. I’m not doubting that you had a good experience with him, I’m just telling you my experience.