Hi Mat,
I was just a bit surprised that your man was asking a very reasonable price for parts and then wanting what seemed to be an excessive amount for labour.
Was the intention to attach the dish to a chimney? Around here, that seems to be the normal practise. Haven’t worked out why. Maybe it’s just to make the job more difficult so they can charge more. Or maybe it’s for aesthetic reasons. Big white dishes are much more conspicuous than Sky minidishes, but are less noticable against the sky.
Here in Normandy a minidish gets a strong signal from Astra, so I was a bit surprised that I needed a bigger dish for Eutelsat.
You may have already researched this, but you should find that your Sky HD box will let you watch all the free-to-view channels, but the recording facility is disabled unless you pay a subscription. Mean beggars!
It is to be mounted onto a barn at about 10ft high.
I will continue to subscribe to Sky to get a fuller range of channels and be able to record - the costs for this is just over £10 per month due to a long standing discount - this seems fair value for money to me. At some point I may stop the subscription and then just receive the free to air via the Sky box.
If a professional is going to do that properly, he would need to put up scaffolding to ensure the safety of his workers. My guess is that we are talking about half a day’s work for two men if you include travel time. Also, he would normally be installing dishes for Eutelsat and might want to make allowance for any unexpected problems encountered in a non-standard installation.
Do you have a scaffold tower? I would advise that. Even a 60cm steel dish is an awkward thing to handle on a ladder and mine is only at 8ft. (2.5m.)
When you have done the job, please share your experience with us and let us know how long it took from unboxing the dish to being able to watch TV. I found that assembling the dish (using minimal pictorial instructions) took quite a while. Also I spent some time deciding on the best route and running the cable. Ended up as a day’s work for this elderly pensioner.
I have paid about 100 - 120 euros for an hour including call out
Hi Mike - it is time to report back for your question.
I ordered this complete kit from UK : Link. The kit took about a week to arrive despite being told it would take 2 days and cost approx £105 ncluding shipping. The kit includes everything you need except tools.
The satellite dish was very easy to mount on the wall and not a problem from a short ladder. It required 5 holes to be drilled, 4 to mount the dish and 1 to run the cable.
I used Link to establish the alignment for the dish which can show you the alignment overlaying a aerial view of your house. Using the included signal receiver plugged into the dish it was simple to achieve the alignment.
All was going well up to this point and this is where the fun started…
I had correctly aligned the dish to the satellite using the signal tester, but I could not get a signal at the TV, the receiver showed absolutely zero signal.
So I tried again, and again, and again but still no joy.
Thinking the alignment was incorrect and that I was therefore incapable I contacted the original local installer to see they could align the dish for me, yes they could at a cost of 75 euro which I agreed to.
The installer arrived and checked the signal and was very puzzled, he confirmed there was a signal at the dish but not at the TV. After several attempts to get it working he suspected it was the kit supplied coax at fault and proved it by running some of his coax around the outside of the house and in via the front window.
The UK kit supplied coax was very thin and of poor quality which lead the to signal over 40m breaking down to nothing. The test piece of coax used by the installer was much thicker. The installer showed me via the markings on the coax the specification he recommends)
Having spent too much time on this already I assisted the installer to install new cable from the dish I had installed to the TV and everything now works very well indeed with a very strong signal.
The installer did charge me quite a bit more than his alignment price of 75 euro, as the price jumped to 230 euros - he spent a couple of hours with us and supplied 2x 40m of cable (I later found out that his price for this was horrific compared to the Brico for exact same spec ).
Frustratingly all of the problems I had were due to the poor quality coax from UK. The installer commented that the rest of the equipment was of very good quality.
Moral to the story - - -
- The kit supplied from UK is pretty good with reasonable delivery times - but the coax is shockingly bad.
- It was easy to install the dish
- Had coax worked it would have taken 1.5 hours to complete the job.
- Buy coax from Brico it is cheap but get this type:
Even with paying installer (at the time unknown expensive) cost for coax it has worked out cheaper by doing it myself but I wasted a couple of house messing about due to the poor cable. I saved approx 100 euro even after the extra cost. Had I simply mounted the dish, ran good coax from dish to TV then had installer do the alignment the saving would have been approx 250 euros.
Would I install a satellite dish again? - on balance yes I would using the lessons I have learned - but I would fully understand somebody simply paying someone else to do it as it would have been far simpler.
I hope @Mike_Kearney you feel this is an honest write up.
This is excellent Mat. I’m sure it would help lots of people. It’s a shame it will buried in this topic. Maybe you could copy and paste the lot into a new topic.
Thanks for sharing.
I’ve done it.
Thanks Mandy others will hopefully find it useful to make an informed decision.
All’s well that ends well and you have been able to share some useful information that will be of help to others.
On the subject of charges, I was recently quoted 70€ for labour and 88€ for parts to replace the brake discs and pads on my small car. I found the parts on Mister Auto for 43,29€ and did the job myself in just over an hour in the yard with a few simple tools. Not a difficult job but it needs to be done with some care because of the importance of getting it right. I would guess that an experienced fitter, with garage equipment, would have done this in 30 minutes.
So I saved myself over 100€ and the time I spent on the job was about the same as it would have taken to drive to the garage and wait around while someone else did the work.
Next job is changing a tap in the bathroom. Wonder how much a plumber would charge?
@Mike_Kearney - on your brakes I would have been tempted to get a garage to do them as the price doesn’t seem horrendous, but I do intend to learn how to replace brake pads on our old car as I will be servicing it myself.
On the satellite dish, having done the job I would say now on balance there is no great overwhelming case for or against doing it myself but perhaps get more quotes for the job initially to ensure they are competitive.
I think that’s fairly horrendous. It works out at 120€ per hour for labour and more than 100% markup on the retail price of the parts.
Your satellite installation would require two men and a van to spend the best part of half a day by the time they got back to base or arrived at the next job.
It also seems that you were badly served by your UK supplier. Good cable doesn’t cost much more than bad cable and you could have bought a decent dish, mast and cable cheaper here in France. Any dish will focus the signal, only the decoder has to be specific to Sky.
Wow I’d expect them to supply all equipment for that price!
We didn’t have much internet at the time and went via Nordnet for our initial set up. All the goodies came to about 250€ and I informed OH he would not be the one to go up ladders to install all.
Local business installed all and connected up the internet and satelite link + phone. To be fair he was here most of the day, locating best angle for connection, so i was happy with 250€ +tax charge, which included a tnt box (he came back next afternoon to check it was ok too!)
I’m in 03, Caz
Hi Sheila
Can you give me more details how did it, I am in the Mayenne region
Hi Sheila
Love to know more on how you did it, please
I have recently fitted a parabole to the side of my house at about as hieght of 9 feet using a satelitte finder that cost 4 euros the job took me a total of 55 minutes.I have since changed the lnb for Sky Q this took me 7 minutes in total .If you would like my knowledge I am more than happy to oblige. my dish is 90 cm and I live in Carpentras deptment 84200.
Trevor