How to Install a Home Theater - Hanging the LCD TV to the Wall
Hi, it’s Keith Harmon with Smart Wired Home, and we’re continuing our series on how to select and install home theater and we’re back with how to actually hang the TV from the wall. Now that you’ve selected your mount, we’re gonna have to have a few tools to do that, drill being one of them. Also we need to have a socket wrench for the screw that’s gonna go into the stud in the wall that we talked about in the last segment, and good idea to have something called a stud finder. And, you know, you can purchase this at your local hardware store, they also make great gifts to give bachelorettes to, you know, find stud, anyway. So, we’re going to, when we place this on the wall, it’s gonna tell us where that stud is, remember, when we saw that earlier where there is a 2 by 4 inside the wall. So as we move that along, we’ll see that it will tell us that is the spot where it is. If you actually decide you don’t, you know, you don’t have one of this, you can also play some games with trying to find it via the sound, it’s hollow versus, it’s a very subtle difference, probably doesn’t come through in the TV, but you can also find it that way. And then the last way, if you wanna really make sure, take a very small nail, and if you put it through the drywall, if there’s nothing on the other side, the nail will just push right through, if you actually hit a stud in the other side, you’ll feel it’ll hit something solid and you’ll basically need to have the claw into the, of the hammer to pull that back out, because it is stuck inside that, that stud. So once you’ve find that stud, you’ll mark the area, it should be about an inch and a half wide, that’s your typical 2 by 4s, actually, it’s close to be two inches, but it’s inch and a half, don’t ask me, it’s the construction industry. So you mark the spot where that is. So next you wanna look at a level to figure out what height did you want, you know, where that is going to go. So, we put a level up on the wall, get that to the point where it is totally leveled, we mark the spots along the wall where the, the top of the mount that mounts the wall we go. So, once you have that line, you then have to line up this to the line, to make again to make sure it’s leveled and then you can mark the spots in here where your lug bolt is going to go into the wall. So, mark those spots, and drill a hole, that will give you a place to mount the, this part of the mount that goes against the wall. Okay, now that we’ve got our mount up on the wall, we’re gonna actually start to look at hanging the TV. Course now you see it, things look a bit messier now, because we actually have all the cables that we need to hook up to the TV. Also, at least that’s important as making sure that it doesn’t fall in the floor. You know, all of the cables we talked about in the other section about cabling, the component cable, digital video, we actually also, this particular TV will actually receive the broadcast as oppose to getting it from the cable box, so we actually have the old style regular cable connector here. Another important thing to have here is a power conditioner, this device will, goes behind the TV, it’s very compact line conditioner, surge suppressor, and it eliminates noise from any kind of electrical interference, to try and keep the TV pictures clean as possible. So, as we’re looking here, you know, three prong plug on the back, three prong plug on the side, so we can plug this in here and then we plug it in to the side. And now the, the power that’s going to the TV has some protection. When we look at the firm mounting here, here on the wall, now we have to look at getting it mounted to the TV itself, so, take our similar tilt mount that we saw before. This is the tilt portion, and we’re gonna hang it from here later and then secure the mount here at the bottom with this set screw. When we look in the back of the TV, we’re gonna again look in our owner’s manual and find the spots for mounting, for this particular TV, we’ve got two fairly good size screws. Because the plasma TV, which are heavier than the LCDs. So we have a nice beefy bolt to go back there, we line that up, we’re gonna put a spacer in here, the reason, the only reason we’re putting a spacer in there is so that it doesn’t go very deep at the TV, we don’t want it to go very far in the TV. A lot of, most of them will actually stop you from doing that, so you’ll screw it in it won't be tight. Another reason, we just don’t wanna, if it doesn’t, we don’t wanna go through and damage anything. So, there we get one side, notice there is a little bit of adjustability here, so you wanna make sure it’s even on both sides. And if your TV, it also nice, coz, if your TV ends up in, at the wrong height, you can take it back down and adjust the, the part of the mount that goes in the back of the TV to make it higher or lower on the wall. We’re gonna tighten this up with our screwdriver, make sure that’s good and tight, make sure it’s tight on both sides. Make sure that the, that it’s even on either side, because we wanna, we definitely wanna make sure it’s not crooked when we put it up there., wich is of course why we used the level earlier. So, now that we’ve got this side of the mount to the TV, we’re ready to go ahead and hang it. So, this is an important part where you wanna make sure that you have some help to do it. Try and do this by yourself is a nice recipe for ending up with a broken TV on the floor. So, we’re gonna take the TV, we’re gonna hang it from the top part of the mount, and then, and then latch it in. So, you get somebody to help, I have my dad here to help me out, and, so lift it up and we have to maneuver it over so that we can then get it up high enough to hang it on the top part and the bottom part just falls right into place. You also note that the way this hangs, you can go ahead let it go, there is a bit of adjustability here, you can move it back and forth, so, that’s a nice feature of the mounts. And then the last thing would be to get your connections going. So, now, what we’ll, usually you have to do to get the connections going is, we’re gonna have to tilt this up a little bit to get at it, some will have connections on the bottom, some will have connections on the side, some have connections in the back, this one has a connections in the back. So, I’ll take this connectors, tilt it up a little and then I can access the various plugs in the back here to put them all in. Once I got them all in, I’m set, and we’re ready to go.