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If you've got little ones, please be sure that your flat screen tv is secured to the stand or anchored to the wall.
Opened the paper yesterday morning, and read that another child ( a 1yr old baby girl) had been crushed to death by a falling flat screen (a 27" tv)
We installed one a week or so after BabyGirl started pulling herelf up (should have done it sooner). Anyway - the anchors cost less than $25 and took less than 15 mins to install.
How sturdy are those stands? I haven't bought a flat screen yet for this very reason. I don't have small children, but I do have pets. I don't want to anchor one to the wall. I think that's tacky. I'm concerned about the stands because they don't look sturdy enough to keep the TV from falling. I fear my dogs will bump into furniture and the TV will either fall on them or fall period and I'd have an injured dog and a 1k loss for the cost of the TV.
The stands are pretty strong in that they won't break, but they are unstable. You can easily push on the top of the TV and make it rock. Personally I have 5 flatscreens in the house. One is 37" and wall mounted in our playroom and surrounded by built-ins. The TV's in the kids rooms are mounted on swivel stands to the wall, but they are also only 22". The TV in the living room we bought a purpose made piece of furniture for and the TV actually mounts to a stand bult-in to the console and appears to "float".
The 32" in our bedroom sits on top of our computer desk. I was worried about it tipping over, but easily solved that by bolting the stand to the desk. Now, this was a cheap desk, so I didn't mind drilling the holes and bolting the TV down. It works great and is very stable.
Overall, you only have three really secure options. Mount it to the wall. Buy a TV console with a built in stand you mount the TV on. Bolt the TV to the furniture by putting bolts through the stand and into the furniture it's on.
When we got our flat screen, we had an antique table (like a sofa table - long and narrow) that was handed down to us so we decided to just use that for the flat screen. All we did was anchor it to the wall with safety straps. That way it didn't have to be flush to the wall, but at the same time couldn't fall forward. With our house layout, the TV is in the most traveled section of the house. The table it is on gets bumped into 20 times a day. We have had dozens of toddlers to our house. Between the base of the tv and the strap, we haven't even had the tv lean much less fall over.
I have had to explain to a lot of worried parents though about the strap. You can't see it, so it looks like it isn't secured at all.
by the way the strap was tested by DH pulling on the top of the tv and leaning back with all of his weight. It didn't budge at all.
When we got our flat screen, we had an antique table (like a sofa table - long and narrow) that was handed down to us so we decided to just use that for the flat screen. All we did was anchor it to the wall with safety straps. That way it didn't have to be flush to the wall, but at the same time couldn't fall forward. With our house layout, the TV is in the most traveled section of the house. The table it is on gets bumped into 20 times a day. We have had dozens of toddlers to our house. Between the base of the tv and the strap, we haven't even had the tv lean much less fall over.
I have had to explain to a lot of worried parents though about the strap. You can't see it, so it looks like it isn't secured at all.
by the way the strap was tested by DH pulling on the top of the tv and leaning back with all of his weight. It didn't budge at all.
The straps work great as long as the TV is near the wall and you can anchor it into a stud. We didn't have that option do to the layout of the desk in our bedroom, hence the bolts.
The straps work great as long as the TV is near the wall and you can anchor it into a stud. We didn't have that option do to the layout of the desk in our bedroom, hence the bolts.
Yeah. If the straps didn't work we had a backup plan that included an older piece of furniture and bolts.
I wasn't hip on mounting the t.v. in our room to the wall either - but with new furniture and the layout of the room, it was sort of the only choice.
I will have to say, I really like it mounted to the wall because it's at a height that I really like as opposed to when it was just on it's stand on the furniture we had it on. They are quite unstable on the stands - especially the bigger ones.
They are quite unstable on the stands - especially the bigger ones.
That is very true. The bigger the TV the worse it is. Smaller LCD's are pretty light, with 32" ones being less than 30 pounds for most sets. However, something like a 42" plasma (what we have in our living room) can weigh 70+ pounds.
An attractive entertainment center or built-in cabinet can add storage space and a safe place for your tv/entertainment stuff...hides all the cables, too.
I've seen more injuries from kids pulling down the old tube tvs more than the flat-screens. The flat-screens are lighter.
Between 1990 and 2007, an estimated 264,200 U.S.
children were treated in hospital emergency
departments for injuries caused by furniture tipping,
about 15,000 each year, according to a study
published in the May online issue of Clinical Pediatrics.
About 300 children died of their injuries.
And since the early 1990s, the number of children injured by falling TVs, shelves and dressers has risen 41 percent, according to the study's analysis of data
collected by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety
Commission.
Quote:
I've seen more injuries from kids pulling down the old tube tvs more than the flat-screens. The flat-screens are lighter.
They may be lighter but are way more unstable - the TV that likked the local girl was "only" a 27 inch.....
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