Blast the Ballast

Our family acquired (according to Laura, by heavenly means) a big screen TV. I am beginning to take issue with the heaven sent theory and regard it as a rather hellish one. The TV when it’s working is a gem. The picture image is great.

However most of the time it sits in our living room broke, taking up space, begging for me to convert it into an aquarium.

The television is a Panasonic PT-50LC13 and apparently we’re not the only ones with issues with it.

When we first got it, we found out it needed a lamp replacement (common with this set according to my investigations on the net). I ordered a lamp through Panasonic (never again). It worked great for awhile but it wasn’t long that the lamp needed replacing again. As these are costly, I ordered one through a company (not Panasonic) that sent me a lamp for a fraction of the price I paid before.

Lamp #2 is working quite well until months ago, the TV decides to shut itself off. It started like every 20 minutes and then we were lucky to get 4 minutes before it would shut off. First thing I did was to check the lamp again, and it was intact. So, I took myself to the net and found several forums suggesting the symptoms our TV was having pointed to a ballast issue.

Ok, so “ballast” is not top in my vocabulary, but I soon learned it was responsible for how much energy gets to the lamp, which might help figure out why we were going through lamps so fast.

One forum in particular talked about it said would be about $600 in parts and labor to get fixed and to try their “simple” method of buying a ballast kit  (Panasonic p/n: LSUC0022) for as little as $20 and repair it yourself. Only a little soldering experience required. So I knew I didn’t want to put $600 into this ‘heaven sent’ television, and purchased the repair kit.

Since I didn’t have a soldering iron, I asked anyone and everyone who even remotely had more of a clue in soldering and electronics than I did if they would be willing to help.

After months and months, I called Jim to see if he had some free time to give it a try.

I don’t think Jim ever has any free time, but he did come by to take out the ballast to take it home to solder all the new parts in.

Only, this thing wasn’t in there as simply as they indicated in the forum. This thing was a pill to take out. Jim had to leave and get his soldering iron to even get half of the parts loose and out, the rest weren’t going to budge.

Even these connectors that looked like they should just pull out, Jimmy finally had to cut them.

My happy ballast technician. 🙂

So our ballast is in his hands to work on at his place.

Fingers crossed.

🙂
Thanks Jim!