Local TV and the Washer

You remember that work bench that I built the other night out on the garage?  It fits into the plan of work for today, but I didn't realize that it did right off in the beginning.....

This is probably the cleanest you will ever see this work bench, because I am notorious for not cleaning up tools and stuff when a project is finished.  I start off talking a good line, but never get it done.

But this picture has to do with today's project of trying to get some local TV stations on our TVs  throughout the house...  They wired us for cable and I will probably subscribe when it is winter time and we are going to be here for several months at a time, but it doesn't make sense to me, to pay for it all the time at over $140 a month when we are not here..

So lets watch what you can pick up with an antenna, which here in Phoenix is quite a bunch of stuff....  Way more than KC anyway....  But we proved fairly rapidly that using rabbit ear antennas doesn't work very will under our tin foil roof sheathing.

So I had to dream up something else....  We have coax pulled into several of the room jacks and a big splitter in the utility closet but without the cable feed from the outside how do I use it?  And the covenants state that we cannot have outside antennas on our roofs...

I went over to Home Depot and sorted thru their powered indoor HD antenna's and came up with the one that I mounted on the top of the work bench pictured in the upper left of the picture above......

See it?

It's actually three barn door UHF antennas with a VHF rabbit ear off to the left.  You can move the two doors on the sides to effect your reception and of course the rabbit ear is loose too...  It gets its power over the incoming wire from a power brick back in the wire cabinet inside.

I then hooked this gizmo up to the incoming wire where the cable is supposed to be connected and quick as a flash we had TV at all the indoor outlets inside the house....

It took me most of the day to whomp up this arrangement and then wire it, as the cable from the garage had to go up into the attic and then come down into the wall where the cable cabinet is located...  But tonight we are scanning about 30 channels of local TV.....  Of course several of them are in Spanish, so now we have the opportunity to work on our language skills.............

And just when we reached our hottest here at the house, 105, the truck came with the new again washer and dryer....

They came out of the boxes without damage this time and are the latest design models available, for the close out price...  But Loyce reminds me that we waited for two weeks to get them so that had to be worth the better models....  But somehow I wonder if GE sees it that way..............

They work, and they haven't stopped since the second the installer guy ran the washer thru on its first rinse cycle to prove that everything functioned.....

Its still grinding away beside me here in the Den.  I'm certain it won't stop until Loyce actually nods off to sleep, and the timer comes to its final rest for the day....

Retired Rod