What do most people do? I don’t want it to look cheap. Obviously I need to be able to point my remote at something.
Robert,
Is this a fireplace that you use? If so, you need to think long and hard about what you are doing. Any consumer grade electronics like a LCD TV is going to be rated for a maximum ambient temperature of something in the area of 90 F. Any temperature higher than that is inviting rapid and catastrophic failure of your TV. In fact, in general, anything above basic room temp is a problem for any electronics and will cause a much higher failure rate than what would be otherwise anticipated for what ever TV it is that you are buying.
I would suggest that you perform a little experiment. Build a fire in your fireplace just like you might later in the season. Now use a thermometer to measure the temperature at the location you would expect to mount this TV.
I realize from a room organization viewpoint, you may think placing your TV above the wall is needed. We have the same sort of situation here. However, we made two focal points in the room instead and could not be happier with our decision.
September 28th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
If you want it to look "tight" (sorry, not sure about your age but tight is a good thing) you can run all your wires into another room/closet/enclosed entertainment system and use a Harmony remote. (these things are AMAZING) You can set it up to do RF (radio frequency) and there are adapters that stick onto your components so that the signal can be received but the signal can be sent through anything so there does not have to be a direct line of sight. And if you have a DVD player connected, all you have to do it hit watch DVD on the remote and it will change the input, turn on/off the components that are needed/not needed and set everything up with the touch of ONE button (Great if you have children or a wife/girlfriend b/c technology can get really confusing sometimes) this can also do multiple rooms too so you can carry it around the house with you and the thing i love the most is that you dont have 10 different remotes… just one. I have the harmony 890 for the whole house and the Harmony One for the "man room" and if you dont want to do RF, you can stil use many different Harmony remotes, but you will need to run a RF splittler. (that is not the exact term, but it is a RF receiver that splits off like an octopus to connect to multiple components. and the RF receiver is about the size of your fingernail and would connect to a discrete spot on the TV to be able to receive the signal, this is a little easier than the "wireless" RF) I know that this may be confusing but it is hard to get the point across without drawing it out or talking it out but I hope this helps. Logitech.com is a good place to look at the universal remotes and the link below is the connector that you would need to do the wireless/non-line of sight setup.
References :
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/remotes/universal_remotes/devices/378&cl=us,en
September 28th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Robert,
Is this a fireplace that you use? If so, you need to think long and hard about what you are doing. Any consumer grade electronics like a LCD TV is going to be rated for a maximum ambient temperature of something in the area of 90 F. Any temperature higher than that is inviting rapid and catastrophic failure of your TV. In fact, in general, anything above basic room temp is a problem for any electronics and will cause a much higher failure rate than what would be otherwise anticipated for what ever TV it is that you are buying.
I would suggest that you perform a little experiment. Build a fire in your fireplace just like you might later in the season. Now use a thermometer to measure the temperature at the location you would expect to mount this TV.
I realize from a room organization viewpoint, you may think placing your TV above the wall is needed. We have the same sort of situation here. However, we made two focal points in the room instead and could not be happier with our decision.
References :