DTV will NOT install at my home

yeah thats why i wasn't too mad the other tech from the first attempt didn't come back b/c he flat out told me he didn't want to go up on the 40ft ladder.

Even so if gutters are slick and thats his reason i showed him the spot in the pic on the far left where the building has a bump out that the ladder could rest against there too. He insisted the ladder wasnt going on the gutters.

My response was well F me then man if I get a leak in the roof cause from your talk getting up there is not possible.

I even suggested a boom life that I would pay for to be brought out for him to use to get up there and he said no its a liability issue. Then I said hey if you know anyone that would come and do it for an extra $100 cash get em out here cause im that freakin desperate at this point and just want the **** done. At that point id take a crappy alignment and miss a few channels and call for another tech to come out later. Least I'd have some good channels and wouldn't be stuck watching only local **** form my attenae.
I figured when he refused the cash offer and said he knew no one that could do that, that he was just a man without balls and scared to do his job. he mentioned that most times he has to come behined his techs b/c of the need of a 40ft ladder he only needs a 32ft and its easy. But mine really does need it so he pussed out it seemed.

Residential satellite installers get paid squat and then can have the squat they have been paid deducted from their earnings if a customer complaint folows.

I don't know the current typical payment for an installation but I have seen a lot of figures in the neighborhood of $70. At that price, an installer is best served by ducking any job that requires a 40 foot ladder, as long as he doesn't get fired.

40 foot ladders are difficult to handle. The one I get stuck using once or twice a year at a commercial property I service weighs just under a hundred pounds. To raise it, I have to put the base against the building and walk under it. I am 6'3" tall and weight 240 pounds and while I am physically capable of handling such a ladder, many people are not. Looking at the shape of your house and location of the fence. it would be more difficult to put up a 40' ladder there than at the places where I have done it in the ordinary course of business. I have been told that fiberglass ladders are much heavier and that often, one person cannot put them up by himself.

If a person does an installation on a 40' ladder and then there is a service call or complaint during the warranty/chargeback perior, he may have to procure another 40' ladder to address the complaint.

There are companies in my market, Washington, DC, that will arrange to install and service on tall buildings needing bucket trucks that will not, under any circumstance, do such an installation for a residential customer no matter what he tells them he agrees to pay for because realistically, when the dish needs service, he will have to call them back because he will have no one else to call. In fact, in another thread, I once adviced someone that if he really does shell out the cost of a high placement, he might as well have them install two dishes with redundant wiring (8 downleads) so that he can use the back-up dish if the first one fails.

In my hungry days, I would have done the installation for you. I carried those stand-off brackets that painters use to keep the ladder about a foot or more away from the wall so as to protect the gutters, and I used to muscle ladders in situations where most others would not, and I am sure you can find someone to physically install the dish for you in the Yellow pages, but you would be paying full fare for the labor, which may be a good deal more than you are expecting to pay. You could buy a dish in eBay for under $80, have it installed and have the downleads run by an independent installer, and then order the DirecTV receivers from an internet dealer and cancel the installation and install them yourself, or even have the installer who shows up put them in for you, but if you order a DirecTV installation from DirecTV, they do not ship the hardware to you: they ship it to the installer and he cannot leave it to be installed by another later. He must take it with him if it is not installed and activated during his visit.

heres my other situation I have once they actually get out here to do it.

I have prewired coax cable in 3 of the 4 rooms getting tv in them. They all 3 run outside near that bumpout in the bottom left of the pic.
1st floor room near that bump out has 1 coax in it already and is getting an HD DVR so i hear i need another run into that one run to that one.
2nd floor - the two windows are each their own room and one has a coax in it already and only getting a standard reciever, while other has no "free" coax in it now(TWC using it for roadrunner) and is getting a standard DVR in it so i need two new coax run into that.
3rd floor has 1 coax in it already and is getting a regular HD receiver.

Any advice on how it should be run so I can make sure I dont get screwed here on the install?

thanks again for the advice/comments so far.

opie168 said:

where would you be talking about mounting the Eve mount? I am a lil confused b/c the line of sight supposedly is across the building to the other side of it, as if directly going through the building if looking at the photo.

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The eave mount would have a couple feet pole, which would give the dish a 360deg look (over the roof) no matter where the look angle is.

Dish could easily be grounded with solid copper ground lead, following under the roof line, down (hidden by) the drainspouts, to a ground rod. IF there isn't a decent grounding point in the attic (again, through the air duct where the cable maybe might/would go).

The 'typical' DirecTV install? Certainly not. Get thee to your phone book and get some independent installer in there. Unless you get REAL lucky and the local contract installers actually want to work.

Since your unit is already 'pre-wired' for cable, your best best would be to figure on the SWM right off the bat. How you would get the output down from the attic (or thereabouts) to the coaxial 'collection point' wherever that is, may be the only problem. But since the SWM is weatherproof (and can be mounted with the dish), the output coaxial could follow the same route as the ground cable, down to (I presume) a junction box at arm height somewhere around the outside of your unit.

You might point out exactly where that 'junction box' is referencing the picture.

First, the standard "professional" installation is limited to areas that are safely reachable with a 28' ladder (i.e., the roof itself is no higher than about 22' above the ground). A 3-story building is automatically a non-standard job, meaning: not free.

Second, mounting on that roof means mounting over the living space. No intelligent (or even experienced) installer will do that, because if the roof leaks, most customers will try to persue a damage claim against the installer, and leaky roofs can easily run up repair bills in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Third, if the dish is mounted on the roof, EVERY time the dish needs service, it's going to cost the customer custom fees. A 40' ladder requires a minimum of 2 people to use safely. DirecTV doesn't pay for 2 people, so the customer has to. DirecTV doesn't pay for a 40' ladder, so the customer has to. DirecTV doesn't pay for the extra time, safety equipment, etc. necessary, so the customer has to. Since most customers balk at paying, most of these installs simply don't get done. DirecTV is not for everyone or for every situation.

Fourth, a 138 pound 40' ladder WILL crush those rain gutters, especially once you put a man with a tool belt and a dish on it. And it will do so every time someone has to get up there. And whoever has to go up there to replace them is going to charge a bunch of money too. DirecTV will get the blame, and they'll just forward that to the installer's insurance, and he'll have to eat the costs. Smart installers will refuse for this reason alone.

Fifth, no intelligent installer is going to put the ladder anywhere but on YOUR area of the roof. You may not mind a crushed rain gutter to get your TV going, but your neighbor WILL.

My company does residential and commercial installs. We could probably do this install, but I'd probably charge somewhere between $500-1000 to do it. Having worked in these multi-story townhomes, I know what kind of hassles they come with. Running cable is extremely difficult, because it can't be done on the outside, no one wants it visible on the inside, and often there is no attic access from the units themselves, since the attic is shared with multiple units.

But, honestly, I'd advise you just to stay with cable, unless you're prepared to budget several thousand dollars over the next few years for installation and maintenance, and be willing to compromise a bit on visible cable in the interior. Townhomes come with lots of compromises, and getting (or not getting) satellite TV may be one of them.

I can almost assure you that you aren't going to get a free install here from anyone, and if you do, it won't be safe, weatherproof, or compliant with your HOA.

IIP said:

My company does residential and commercial installs. We could probably do this install, but I'd probably charge somewhere between $500-1000 to do it

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That's about right. I do consulting for three companies in my area that do the same, and they do at least 2-3 jobs per week that are/were either outright refusals by the locals (Ironwood), or were botched by the same.

But if you look at cost analysis, 'cable' would over time far out pace the one-time expense of the dish installation. Paying those 'rental' fees (decoder boxes) on top of exorbitant programming fees (don't go by the timed 'deals' that explode cost wise after a few months), there's always the access to particular programming, i.e., lack of HD, lack of sports programming, you name it.

Everybody's situation is different. Toss the numbers; I think that opei168 has probably already done that, and knows that the one-time cost to install would be easily offset by a year or two vr. cable. Then again, there's that programming access.

How many times have I read here where, for instance SundayTicket was the single most important reason to have DirecTV in the first place? Or ExtraInnings (which most cablecos have access to, but don't carry). In my neck of the woods, there are a large contingent of folks who LIVE for CenterIce. It's all up to personal 'needs'.

Just about anything can be done, anywhere. This is a pretty simple job compared to some. I'm sure a local independent guy would take one look and give you a price in less than 5 minutes. Toss the figures beforehand and get an idea on what it's worth to you.