A while ago, my TV stopped working completely. Nothing at all when I tried to switch it on. I left it alone for a week or two, but eventually it got to me - not so much because there was something I wanted to watch, but because I had a big expensive box of electronics in my lounge room that wasn't working. So I opened it up to take a look at what might be wrong. Fixing it was probably going to be more entertaining than the TV shows being broadcast anyway.
Given that it was completely unresponsive, and that the power indicator on the front didn't light up, the first place I looked was the power supply. Sure enough, it turned out it was just a fuse. As you can see from the picture it had blown in a quite spectacular way. It looks like it sensed some really bad TV shows coming and exploded in disgust.
It's interesting that the fuse is mounted inside the plastic power supply cage. For another device like a stereo system I might think that this made sense, because it prevents idiot users like me from accidentally touching a source of high voltage. But in a TV set, there are very high voltages in other exposed places that could also give a very nasty (probably fatal) shock. Surely a fuse holder accessable from outside the case would be safer, so that no-one is tempted to open the case?
I remember home appliances that used to have a screw-in fuse holder accessible from the outside of the box: changing a fuse like this is no more complicated or dangerous than changing a light bulb. There are of course reasons we don't do this any more. A fuse holder like this costs a little extra money, which makes it very unattractive to a manufacturer who needs to shave every cent possible off the cost in order to remain competitive. It is, however, concerning to see how disposable electronic appliances are becoming. I see discarded items on the side of the street every week around rubbish collection day, and I wonder how many of them could be fixed easily. I guess I should consider myself lucky that my TV set had a replaceable fuse at all. I wonder what's in a new TV set now?