Abandoned TV left on for years in Japan...

[jhal]

Originally Posted by andy

TVs are often left on for years at a time. A store near my home that's open 24 hours a day has a 20" RCA TV mounted by the door connected to a security camera. It's been on 24 hours a day since the store opened in 2002 and it still looks ok. I see no evidence that it's ever been taken down for repair. I imagine they will just replace it rather than have it repaired when it fails.

It probably has terrible burn-in by now, unless it switches to different cameras regularly.

[radiotvnut]

I may be missing something; but, you'd think the electricity would be turned off on these dwellings that were abandoned for years. Surely, someone is not paying an electric bill on a dwelling that no one has darkened the door in for years.

[dr.ido]

Sometimes places just fall through the cracks for some reason. I once wandered through an abandoned office building that hadn't been occupied for at least 5 years. It still had power, several active phone lines and working hot water. I was surprised that there was no one squatting there (other people obviously knew about the place judging by the graffiti and holes in the wall).

It does look like someone had been living in the room (after it had been vacated) in the original post. Perhaps they hooked up power themselves bypassing the meter.

If a building is left vacant long enough someone will eventually decide to move in. In several places I've seen varying attempts at furnished "rooms" in hidden and hard to get to niches.

A couple of them had TVs, one had a microwave, another had a 70s 3-in-1 stereo and a small collection of LPs, one guy had a 486 PC and a pile of old games on floppy disks. None of this looked like stuff left behind by the previous owners, it all appeared to have seen recent use.

All of these places still had power. In some it just hadn't been cut off, in others it was obvious they had hooked it up themselves (jumpers bypassing a missing switchboard, power strips hanging by aligator clips).