Audio & Video Installation near you

Class H of Part 1 of Schedule 2 to the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015 permits the installation, alteration or replacement of a microwave antenna on a dwellinghouse or within the curtilage of a dwellinghouse, subject to limits. Development is not permitted where it would result in more than two antennas on the property, or where a single antenna exceeds one metre in any linear dimension. Where two are installed, the Planning Portal's guidance for a house or building up to fifteen metres high explains that one may be up to one hundred centimetres in any linear dimension and the other up to sixty centimetres.

Three further limits catch people out. The cubic capacity of any individual antenna must not exceed thirty-five litres. An antenna on a chimney must not exceed sixty centimetres in any linear dimension and must not protrude above the chimney. And on a roof without a chimney stack, the antenna must not exceed the height of the highest part of the roof. The Planning Portal adds that linear dimension is measured in a straight line from the edge of the antenna to the opposite edge, counting only the antenna itself and not the brackets or mounts needed to fix it.

On land in a conservation area and comparable designated land, the rights are narrower: an antenna must not be installed where it would be visible from a highway, a waterway or a building over fifteen metres tall. Class H also does not apply to a dwellinghouse created under the permitted development rights in Part 20. The Order is an English instrument — Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have their own permitted development regimes — so check with your own planning authority if you are outside England, and check anyway if the property is a flat, where the rules differ again.

Class H is a planning permission. It is not a listed building consent, and the two are entirely separate questions, which is where AV work on a period house most often goes wrong. Section 7 of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 restricts alteration that would affect a listed building's character as one of special architectural or historic interest unless the works are authorised under section 8, and it draws no line between the outside and the inside. A dish on a front elevation, a mast bracket driven into a stone parapet, a cable chased through historic lath and plaster and a bracket screwed through a moulded cornice are all candidates.

What makes this worth pausing over is the penalty. Under section 9 the consequence of getting it wrong is criminal, not a retrospective application: up to six months' imprisonment or a fine on summary conviction, and up to two years or a fine on indictment, with the court expressly directed to consider any financial benefit that has accrued or looks likely to accrue. The narrow defence for urgently necessary safety, health or preservation works requires the work to have been the minimum immediately necessary and written notice to have gone to the local planning authority as soon as reasonably practicable — which does not describe a television installation. The Act covers England and Wales; Scotland and Northern Ireland legislate separately. If the building is listed, get the consent question settled before a date is booked.

Aerial and dish work is work at height, and the Work at Height Regulations 2005 define that more broadly than people expect. Regulation 2 defines work at height as work in any place, including a place at or below ground level, and obtaining access to or egress from such place while at work, except by a staircase in a permanent workplace, where a person could fall a distance liable to cause personal injury. There is no minimum height written into the definition.

Regulation 3 sets out who carries the duties. The requirements imposed on an employer apply in relation to work by an employee, or by any other person under his control, to the extent of his control; they also apply to a self-employed person in relation to his own work and to work by persons under his control, and to any other person in relation to work by a person under his control, to the extent of that control. In practice that means the contractor you engage carries the duty for how the work is done, and a sole trader working alone on your roof carries it for himself.

The homeowner's part is simpler and still worth taking seriously: do not ask for the corner-cutting. Do not press for the job to be done from a ladder because scaffolding or a tower would cost more or take longer, do not leave a contractor to find their own way onto a roof you know is fragile, and never go up yourself to save a call-out. Roof and aerial falls are among the accidents that end badly, and the equipment at stake is a television aerial.

Ask what the wall is. A television bracket into dot-and-dab plasterboard is the single most common failure in this trade: the board is fixed to the masonry with adhesive dabs, so a fixing that grips only the board has a cavity behind it and a heavy screen hanging off it. The right answer is a fixing that reaches the masonry, and knowing that requires someone to check rather than assume.

Then settle the cables. Where do they run, how are they concealed, and is there spare capacity for the next device? A chase with a conduit in it costs very little more than a chase with a single cable in it, and it is the difference between an upgrade in three years being a morning's work and being another round of plastering. Ask where the sockets end up too, because a beautifully flush television with a visible extension lead beneath it is a job half done.

Finally, agree the making good in writing. Filling, sanding and matching paint after a chase is real work, and quotations differ far more on whether it is included than on the bracket.

External aerial and dish hardware weathers, and the failures are boringly predictable: corroded clamps, a mast bracket rusting into a wall, perished cable at the point where it enters the loft, and a connector that has been letting water in for a year. A visual check from the ground after a bad winter, and a proper look whenever scaffolding is up for something else, saves most emergency call-outs.

Inside, the maintenance is ventilation and cable management. Cupboards fill up, a new device gets added on top of the last one, and the stack gets hotter every year. And keep a note of what is connected to which input on what, because the person who knows that is almost never the person standing in front of the television when it stops working.

A wall mount on a stud wall in a modern house and the same mount on a solid Victorian chimney breast are different jobs, and the wall is the first thing that moves a quotation. After that: how far cables run and whether they are surface-trunked or chased in, how many rooms are being fed, whether any external work is involved and what access it needs, whether making good and decoration are included, and whether the installer is configuring control as well as fixing hardware. External aerial work needs safe access arranged, and that is a cost in its own right rather than something to be squeezed.

LokalMatch exists to make the introduction. Tell it what you want installed and what the walls are, once, with your postcode, and AV installers covering your area contact you directly. Homeowners are not charged; pros pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not do the installing, does not set prices and does not vet, rank or recommend the businesses that respond, so ask each of them about fixings, cable routes and making good before you compare the totals.