The second telly nobody planned for, and what broke

The television in the bedroom was an afterthought. It came out of the living room when we replaced that one, went upstairs because it seemed a waste to get rid of it, and sat there for a year being used about twice a month.

Then my wife broke her ankle and spent six weeks upstairs, and that afterthought became the most-used screen in the house.

What I discovered in those six weeks is that a setup which is completely fine as an occasional thing falls apart as a main thing, and it falls apart in ways you would never predict from using it twice a month.

The remote was the first casualty. It was the small one that came with the stick, it had no numbers, and when you are watching six hours a day rather than twenty minutes a fortnight, scrolling to find a channel goes from mildly irritating to genuinely infuriating.

The second was the wifi. Upstairs, through a floor, it had been fine for the occasional programme. Six hours a day, including the evening, and it started dropping quality regularly. I ended up running a powerline adapter up there, which cost about thirty pounds and worked immediately.

The third was the one I did not see coming: the stick got hot, because it was in a room with the door closed and the heating on, and a hot stick throttles.

All three of those are the same lesson. A setup gets judged on how it performs at its heaviest use, not its average, and the room you think does not matter is one broken ankle away from mattering a lot.

What I would do now, and did afterwards: put a proper box up there rather than a stick, on a cable if you can manage it, with a remote that has numbers. It cost about seventy pounds all in and the bedroom is now the room nobody complains about.

If you are working out what to put in a secondary room, this comparison is worth reading with heavy use in mind rather than occasional use, because the two lead to different answers.

Six weeks, thirty pounds of cable, and a remote with numbers on it.

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