House abandoned, TV left on...

[Carmine]

Just found this while poking around, looking at abandoned stuff...

http://www.abandonedbutnotforgotten.com/tv_house.htm

The TV looks like a 70s SS RCA set? Anybody care to chime in with a year/model? Somebody walked away from the house and left the TV playing... Weird!

[bgadow]

Suppose you left that set on and just walked away...suppose you left it for, say, 20 years. Those were decent sets. The crt would have to be dead, right? Might the rest of the set just keep trucking along?

Goes well with my thread in bw about my great-grandparents house. Abandoned since 1971, roughly. There is still a mailbox in front of the house with their name on it. When they started cleaning it out they had the power turned on. Very surprising that the power company went ahead and did it. Light hadn't been on in perhaps decades, now lit again. The fifties International Harvester refrigerator started cooling. Bottles of Heinz ketchup in a box upstairs, unopened, turned black inside, something apparently ate the labels. In that same village sits a mill, dating to the 1800s. One day in the mid-70s the 90-something miller went home and didn't come back. His hat and his pipe tobacco still sit by the door where he left them. All interesting stuff.

One more: my first "real" job (where they were taking taxes out and all that stuff) was back in 1991. I was told to box up all the merchandise in this little variety store. The place had been closed for, I'd estimate, 10-15 years. Shelves were full of made in Hong Kong stuff. This place was right in a premium spot on the highway. We loaded it on a truck and carried it to an old garage out in, really, the middle of nowhere. They said they were going to reopen the store out there. Their main business was plumbing fixtures, and the whole back of that place on the highway was fully stocked with toilets, showers, etc. I only worked there a week.

Fast forward. They never opened the middle-of-nowhere store, nor did they ever do anything with the place we cleared out. One day a couple years ago I needed a toilet and shower so I visited the old showroom. I don't think anything has moved in or out since 1991. The little old lady who runs the place had all the lights turned off when we got there. It smelled like a locker room in there. In the center of the showroom, with pride, sat a beautiful top-of-the-line Kohler toilet along with a chart showing all the latest 1980 colors. Weird.

[3Guncolor]

Where I work we have some sets/monitors that are never turned off some of them are getting close to 20 years old the key is not driving the CRT hard. It is possible for them to last that long.

[ChrisW6ATV]

I know of some B/W monitors at airports that have been in use mostly 24 hours per day since maybe 1979 or even earlier. One Conrac SNA23 I know has a quite good CRT, even. As 3gun said, keep the contrast and brightness moderate and they last much longer.

[mech986]

Looks cabinet wise like my parent's old 1973 XL-100 but without the pullout control drawer.

http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/att...3&d=1149468230

Regards,

Bart

[Chad Hauris]

This looks like a CTC-68, the auxiliary controls are slide controls behind a door next to the channel knobs. I lightened up the photo so you can see it better.

[Aage]

Originally Posted by bgadow

Fast forward. They never opened the middle-of-nowhere store, nor did they ever do anything with the place we cleared out. One day a couple years ago I needed a toilet and shower so I visited the old showroom. I don't think anything has moved in or out since 1991. The little old lady who runs the place had all the lights turned off when we got there.

Life: you don't get out alive...

[zenith2134]

If the set was solid state, I would bet a fair amount that at least the sound would still be working. Amazing really. They claimed it was playing white noise, so maybe the tuner eventually gave out (unlikely unless it was tubed though). Or maybe it is haunted.

As far as the on-all-the-time mentality, I too feel that if you keep the luminance settings mid-range it will last and last. After all, thats the way it was designed. I have seen a few early-80s computers that were never turned off, still working. Also, I gave away a 1981 Quasar (matsushita) 19" set to my friend when they moved once. I trash-picked two of the same exact sets. One was really burned-in, I mean totally lifeless CRT but still working. I gave them the other one, pretty heavily used, but decent. Well, they left that thing running all day and all night for like 2 years. On when they left for vacation even. (Don't ask why??). Sadly, they threw it away and didn't tell me.

Almost forgot! Tonight I was in a bowling alley in Long Island, NY and they had a row of video arcade machines. Among them was Pac-man, an original as far as I could tell. It was not lit up, and I went to see why. The whole CRT was completely burnt-in, a perfect phosphor burnt rendition of the game. Hope someone could do a tube-swap around there, would be a shame to toss it.

[fsjonsey]

Originally Posted by Carmine

Just found this while poking around, looking at abandoned stuff...

http://www.abandonedbutnotforgotten.com/tv_house.htm

The TV looks like a 70s SS RCA set? Anybody care to chime in with a year/model? Somebody walked away from the house and left the TV playing... Weird!

I guess im not the only AK'er that browses Urban exploration sites. The old state mental hospitals are the creepiest, especially if they left all the equipment in the place.. This hospital even had TV sets in the wall, behind thick glass, that were unaccessible to the patients. In fact, they are nothing but a bare chassis. Can anyone identify it?

I'd have been more concerned about that big blue barrel with the corrosive liquid warning label sitting on top of the set. Great stuff for "dissolving" various things you don't want found...

[Kiwick]

i have quite a collection of urban exploration sites in my favourites folder.

But i haven't yet seen that hospital with TVs embedded in the walls, can you post a link to this gallery?

Francesco

[fsjonsey]

Originally Posted by Kiwick

i have quite a collection of urban exploration sites in my favourites folder.

But i haven't yet seen that hospital with TVs embedded in the walls, can you post a link to this gallery?

Francesco

The hospital was called Northville Regional Psychiactric hospital. Here are a couple of different sites that have galleries on it.

http://www.chiprjones.com/nrph/nrph.htm

http://www.nrph.net/

[Modegard]

Also check out the Studebaker plant in Indiana. Very sad.

[andy]

Very interesting pictures. I've always been curious about what was inside abandoned buildings, but I've never had the guts (or is that too much sense) to go inside.

Now that I live in a place where even a house like that would be worth $500k (or more) it's hard to imagine abandoned houses an more. Has anyone considered the possibility that the TV was turned on recently by another visitor to the house?

[bgadow]

That TV chassis is pretty bare. I'm guessing a specially built monitor for use with a closed circuit system. It is spooky!