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Lifts And Let Downs

coast-cabinet_1333-0814If there has ever been an AV product category that I’ve maintained a love/hate relationship with, it’s motorized TV lifts and mounts.

On the plus side of the equation, there are few things cooler than a concealed installation where a flat panel display or projector rises from a tabletop or descends from the ceiling.

But on the downside, while lifts can create a fantastic, futuristic experience, they carry tremendous potential to be a weak link in the installation, and source of aggravation, not just for the client, but for your team.

Fortunately, all the downsides of lifts can be avoided by choosing the brands of lifts you work with by following some simple recommendations, and learning from the bad experiences of others.

The first factor to evaluate is motor noise and how smoothly the mechanism operates. That right there can either create or ruin the magical effect of having a motorized lift in the installation.

You may be surprised to learn that price isn’t always a factor when it comes to motor noise. I once watched a demo of a lift at CEDIA Expo that sounded like a blender full of marbles when its motor was running, and whose horizontal tilt made a KACHUNK! noise when rotating left to right.

That lift, which was part of a series that were made-to-order averaged ten grand for one that would fit a fifty inch flat panel. At the same show, I saw an off-the-shelf, non-custom unit for two grand that was as quiet as a mouse.

That lesson was not lost on me: Get facetime with mounts and lifts, and monkey with them BEFORE you specify one into the client’s house!

Let me reiterate that: Don’t choose a lift vendor based just on price, specs on their website, or a nice brochure. Research. Experiment. Visit vendors at shows, and if at all possible get the vendor’s territory rep to drive a demo unit to your office and show you how it works.

Next on your agenda should be serviceability. You want to work with quality brands, ones that seldom break. But “seldom” is not the same as “never.” Designers need to plan for serviceability in their systems, asking themselves “if this piece breaks, how do we deal with it.”

Get into the mechanism and take a good hard look at it.  How easy is it going to be to get into it and service it, with or without a TV and mounting bracket in the way?  Ask yourself what the worst-case scenario is, and how easy would it be to repair.

Here’s an example from real life. We had installed a ceiling lift whose AC power supply died.  The only way to remove the module was from the inside of the enclosure and required first removing the fifty-inch TV and its mounting hardware, then required someone skinny, left handed and with long arms to wriggle up into the top of the enclosure with a right-angle socket driver and remove the screws holding the module in place.  Fortunately, we had an installer who fit the bill, but it was still a hassle.

Look for units that allow for multiple control options, and then design redundancy into your automation system’s control of the lifts.

Why? Even if you’re committed to using serial control to manage the lift mechanism, engineer redundancy into your design and run extra Cat5 and two-conductor security wire lines so that in a pinch you can rig the lift to operate via 12v trigger, hardwired RF or even IR.

That way, if something goes wrong, extra control options allow you to more easily troubleshoot whether the source of the problem is software/hardware, AC power/low voltage, or something else entirely.  Knowing what the problem isn’t is an important step towards finding out what the problem is.

I love television and projector lifts.  I love them even more when they work perfectly.  Be choosy when selecting products, and apply some good decisions to your project designs, and they’ll work perfectly for you, too.

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