That stubborn drop ceiling tile took me 3 hours today

I mean, I've done hundreds of these, but this one house over in Clifton had a drop ceiling in the basement that looked perfectly normal. Customer said the TV signal kept cutting out, so I figured it was a bad splitter or maybe a loose connector. I spent a solid hour checking every fitting and even swapped the wall plate twice. Turns out some previous installer had run the coax right alongside a fluorescent light ballast in the ceiling, and the interference was just screaming through. I finally moved the line about 18 inches away and zip tied it to a floor joist, problem solved. Has anyone else dealt with interference from old ballasts or did I just get lucky with this fix?

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the_emma1mo ago

Funny how it's never the obvious stuff, it's always the weird hidden thing that eats up your whole afternoon. Once I spent forever chasing a crackling noise in a speaker setup and it turned out to be the dimmer switch on the other side of the room, just radiating junk through the air. Seems like old tech and new tech never quite learned to share space politely, and we're the ones stuck playing referee.

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