So I’m reading this article on The Consumerist site (”DirecTV Contractor: No, We Won’t Fix Our Botched Installation“) and in particular, the comments left by readers of the article, several of which come to the same conclusion that I came to a long time ago: There is no way any installer is going to care about your home the way you do. They don’t have to live in your home for many years, but you do. They don’t have to put up with a crappy looking install, or leaks or water damage to your home, or insects or rodents finding a new route up from your crawl space or basement – you do.
Still, you’d think that these companies would try to get people that at least pretend to care. For many years, telephone company installers were very careful about how they did an install – they were well trained and it was very seldom you’d see a telephone installation that wasn’t at the very least neat – the wires might be exposed, but they be in straight lines, and where possible they’d be run through closets or cabinets or attics to keep them out of sight.
Case in point: In the house I grew up in, the phone wiring ran around the outside of the house to a phone that hung on the wall, in what was then called a dining room, but by today’s standards would have been a large closet. It had been there a while, and was the old stuff that had three individualy insulated wires stapled together. My dad had talked about getting new siding on the home (as it turned out, we never did) but we drilled a hole from the attic into the wall and pulled a wire down to the phone to use as a fish wire, then called Michigan Bell to come out and run their wire through the attic and down inside the wall (this, by the way,was when they would still do that sort of thing for free!). Now, any normal person might have simply run the telephone wire from rafter to rafter and stapled it down, but not the telephone company – they actually ran the wire around each rafter and stapled it to the rafters and the underside of the roof board. This meant it used about twice as much wire, but there was no way anything would catch on the wire and break it unless you went out of your way to jam something into it. And the job was neat and straight. Bear in mind, this was in a small, unfinished attic that we mainly used for storing boxes of Christmas decorations.
But nowadays you have broadband, cable and satellite installers that just don’t seem to care. In some cases the results can be tragic, in other cases just costly and/or inconvenient. It’s as though some companies just hire anyone, give them minimal training, and don’t even think to instruct them in basic courtesy. If I ran one of these companies, I’d hang signs in employee areas saying things like, “Please respect your customer – treat their home as if you had to live there for the next quarter century” (but then again, that may not work if you have an installer that couldn’t care less about his own home).
One thing that constantly amazes me about satellite installs is that installers put the dish on the roof. In any place that gets snow, that is an absolutely idiotic thing to do. Let me say this again: If the installation company wants to mount a satellite dish on your roof, they are a bunch of idiots (with one exception)! Now why would I say that? Because, unlike terrestrial television signals, you do NOT get any appreciable signal gain by mounting a satellite dish high off the ground. I have seen satellite dishes mounted at ground level that work just fine, at least until they get a pile of snow in front of them. There is only one good reason to mount a dish on a roof, and that’s where you need the additional height to get a clear signal over the top of trees in a neighbor’s yard (in which case you may simply be buying time until the trees get larger), or to clear some other obstruction such as an adjacent tall building. It’s very rare that the additional height actually makes a difference, but it’s not totally unheard of, particularly when a neighbor’s trees are involved.
At the very least, dishes should be mounted under the eaves in a location where snow or ice will not slide down the roof onto them, if such a location is available. For a great many people, perhaps even a majority, the ideal mounting option for a satellite dish is on a metal pole stuck into the ground, a few feet away from the side of the house (or further away if necessary to get a clear signal), where the dish is about five to six feet above ground level. This is high enough that the signal won’t be interrupted by people or animals walking nearby, but low enough that should snow accumulate in the dish, it can be easily brushed off with a broom. Who wants to climb up onto a roof to brush snow off of a dish?
But installers hate putting a dish on a metal pole because they have to make two trips: The first is to dig the hole, insert the metal pole, insert a piece of plastic pipe or tubing so you can run the cable out through the concrete and keep it underground (to avoid damage from lawn mowers, etc.), mix and pour three or four bags of concrete, level the metal pole in the concrete, and then keep the pole perfectly level while the concrete sets. You may note that I keep saying metal pole. You can buy a 10 foot long galvanized steel pipe at most home improvement stores that works great for the purpose. But some homeowners have tried using a treated wood pole – that’s a big mistake, because even though the pole won’t rot, it will warp and twist, and soon your signal disappears. On the second trip (after the concrete dries), the installer then has to install and aim the dish. Obviously it’s a lot faster and easier to just attach the dish to the roof or the eaves, and get it all done in one trip, and what do they care if it causes a leak or rots the wood?
Now you may be thinking that this is a reason to just get cable, but cable installers aren’t much better. They may not drill holes in your roof, but when drilling down through the floor they tend to drill holes four to six inches away from the wall instead of right next to it, and often they have no idea what’s below where they are drilling. It’s not uncommon for them to take out telephone wiring or (more rarely) electrical wiring, or to hit a water or sewer pipe with their drills. And they sure don’t seem to care about appearance sometimes – it’s not as though they make any effort to conceal that big, black wire, even when they could easily do so. As an example, drive around any manufactured housing development (a.k.a. mobile home park) and you will see cable wires running along the side of the home, when there is no reason those wires could not have gone through the floor and underneath the home – except that the installer would have had to pop off a couple pieces of skirting and used some fish tape to do it right.
The moral of this story is, if you value your home and you are the least bit handy, do your own installations. If necessary, have the dish installation company come out and show you the best location for a dish in your yard, and have them leave the dish with you. Buy the pole and the concrete and set the pole yourself (be sure to keep it level!). If you don’t feel you are handy enough to do this, then shadow the installer and if he is about to do anything you don’t like, stop him! You can try to keep it friendly (suggestion: try to get him to tell you stories about the poor installations he’s encountered on his job that have been done by other installers; that may have the effect of encouraging him to do better than they did) but in the end, remember that you will be living in the home and if he causes roof leaks, or leaves holes where the elements can penetrate or insects or rodents can enter, you will be living with the result – and you may not find the damage until the statue of limitations is long past, so you’ll be the one that has to pay for the repairs. If you rent, the landlord may take the damage off of your security deposit (particularly if you never gave prior notification that the install was taking place).
As an aside, I just love the television commercials where the cable companies try to claim that they are more reliable than the satellite companies – the fact is, if the service is installed properly you will have very little trouble with satellite TV (you may lose signal for five or ten minutes during a torrential rain, but even that can be pretty much avoided if you use a slightly larger dish). On the other hand, what cable television subscriber would tell you that their cable service never goes out (or stays out for five to ten minutes at most when it does go out)? Snow accumulation in dishes isn’t as big a problem as you might think, but if you get a really sticky snow it can accumulate on the dish and potentially drop the signal below a usable level, which is a good reason to keep the dish low enough to the ground that a swipe or two with a broom resolves that problem.
Let’s hope that in 2008 the telephone, cable, and satellite companies rediscover the meaning of good customer service – which means, in part, treating every customer’s home as if the president or CEO of the company lived there!
Subscribe to Michigan Telephone, VoIP and Broadband blog
