★Service · Outdoor

Outdoor TV installation · Kansas City.

IntegrateIT installs weatherproof outdoor displays across the Kansas City metro from Overland Park, Kansas, Prairie Village, Leawood and Mission Hills included. On a covered patio here the answer is a full-shade outdoor-rated display, sealed, heated and cooled for the swing, rather than an indoor television under a roof: SunBriteTV’s Veranda 4 Series is the shade model we specify, and a patio that catches afternoon sun steps up to the partial-sun SE Series. We specify the mount, the rated circuit, the pathway and the sun angle with the same care, because that is where outdoor installations actually go wrong. The display is the part people shop for and the least likely part to fail. Paired with Coastal Source landscape audio, Lutron landscape lighting and your Control4, Crestron or Sonos system. Call (913) 804-7575.

Below: what a Kansas City year does to a television, how the three brightness classes get chosen and when the answer is shade rather than brightness, everything behind the screen, why outdoor audio is its own discipline, what a review board will want to see, and how it all comes on with one press.

A Kansas City year is the specification

This climate is hard on electronics, and not for the reason people assume. It is not that it gets hot or that it gets cold. It is that it does both, repeatedly, and swings between them fast. A humid August afternoon on a covered porch runs well past the operating range an indoor panel is rated for. A January night on the same porch goes far below the temperature at which a liquid crystal layer can be damaged. In between, the metro cycles through freeze and thaw many times each winter, and every cycle pumps moist air into and out of anything that is not sealed.

That cycling is what actually kills indoor equipment used outdoors. Condensation forms behind a bezel, sits on a circuit board, evaporates, and returns the following week. Outdoor-rated displays are sealed against it and heat and cool themselves so the panel stays in range at both ends of the year. They cost meaningfully more than an equivalent indoor set — that is the honest part of the trade — and they are still cheaper than replacing an indoor set, its mount and its labor every other spring.

There is one case where we say the opposite. If the space is really a three-season porch that gets enclosed with glass, an indoor display in a protected location can be the correct buy. We would rather have that conversation on the walk than sell weatherproofing to a room that is not outdoors.

Brightness is chosen by orientation and hour, not by catalog

Outdoor displays come in three broad classes, and the difference between them is several times over in brightness and in price. Full-shade panels are for covered porches and outdoor rooms with a real overhang, where direct sun never lands on the screen. Partial-sun panels are for patios that catch sun for an hour or three. Full-sun panels are for pool decks, open patios and cabanas that are exposed through the afternoon.

Getting it wrong is expensive in both directions. Underspecify and the screen washes out at exactly the hour you bought it for — a Sunday afternoon in September, the game on, nothing visible. Overspecify and you have paid several times over for brightness a porch roof was already providing. So we walk the site at the hour you say you will watch, and we look at which way the space faces: a west-facing Leawood patio in July and a north-facing one across the street are not the same specification even though they photograph identically.

Sometimes the honest answer is that you do not have a brightness problem at all. Glare is geometry. Low western sun on a screen at six in the evening is barely improved by more brightness and enormously improved by shade — a pergola with the louvers turned the right way, a deeper overhang, or moving the display fifteen feet to a wall that is not aimed into the sunset. Where the geometry cannot be changed, a motorized exterior shade can be: we carry and install Screen Innovations exterior shades, which drop across the open side of a patio on the same schedule as the lighting and take the low sun off the screen before anyone asks for a brighter one. We have talked homeowners out of a full-sun display more than once that way.

Where the geometry cannot be changed, the shade can be motorised. We carry and install Screen Innovations exterior shades, which drop on the same press that wakes the television and roll away again afterwards — and because the manufacturer publishes its wind ratings by fabric rather than by system, the fabric is a specification rather than a finish choice on an exposed Kansas City patio. On the display itself, Samsung's Terrace is one of the lines we specify out here, in full-sun and partial-sun versions that map onto the three classes above. SunBriteTV is the other, and it splits its own range along the same line: the Veranda 4 Series for full shade, the SE Series for partial sun, and the Solis and Pro 2 Series for full sun — the Pro 2 being the one with a tempered-glass shield over the panel. Both are carried and installed under distribution.

Everything behind the screen

This is the part of the job that decides whether the installation is still good in year five, and it is the part that gets quoted thinly by everyone else.

• The mount, chosen for metallurgy. Indoor mounts use hardware that corrodes, and after a couple of freeze-thaw winters the articulation seizes solid. Forcing a seized arm damages it. We use outdoor-rated mounts with corrosion-resistant hardware, and we exercise and service the articulation on maintenance visits rather than discovering it on a Saturday.
• A dedicated, rated circuit. GFCI-protected, with an in-use weatherproof cover, positioned so the plug and the cord clear the back of the mount. An extension cord snaked along a beam is the outdoor failure nobody admits to, and it is a safety problem before it is an aesthetic one.
• Conduit on the signal side, always. The cable a display wants changes with each generation, and conduit costs very little at rough-in.
• Terminations detailed to shed water. Drip loops so water runs away from a connector rather than into it, enclosures that drain instead of collect, and direct-burial-rated cable in UV-stable conduit wherever a run leaves the structure.
• Sources kept out of the weather. The streamer or cable box lives in the rack inside the house and the picture travels to the patio over structured cable — the same architecture we use for multi-room video. One less thing outdoors, and one less thing to reach when it is replaced.

Outdoor sound is a different problem from indoor sound

A soundbar under an outdoor television disappoints for a structural reason: outdoors there are no walls and no ceiling to reinforce it, so everything that made it sound full inside is gone, and the level falls away with distance far faster than people expect. The fix is the one that works in a restaurant — several small sources distributed at modest level rather than one working hard. Coastal Source builds for exactly this, with connectors and enclosures designed to live in a Midwest landscape year-round rather than survive one summer.

Distribution also solves the neighbor problem, which in the closer-set yards of Prairie Village and Brookside is a real design constraint. Sound that is loud at the source carries across property lines; sound that is quiet everywhere in your yard does not, because it never had to be loud. We zone the patio separately from the pool and the far lawn for the same reason. The full outdoor audio discussion is on our outdoor audio page and on the Coastal Source dealer page.

Sightlines, review boards and the older backyard

Much of the newer building in south Overland Park, Leawood and Stilwell sits in master-planned neighborhoods with an architectural review process, and outdoor AV is exactly the kind of work those boards look at, because it puts visible hardware on an elevation. We do not guess at any particular association’s rules — we ask for them, keep equipment off the visible elevations wherever we can, and prepare what the submission needs. Getting told no after the conduit is buried is the outcome worth avoiding.

Older backyards have the opposite constraint. Around Brookside, Mission Hills and the pre-war Prairie Village streets, the house is often brick or stone, mature trees sit exactly where a trench would go, and there is frequently no straightforward path from the interior rack to the patio wall. There the pathway is the whole design: we plan it before we specify anything, and where a masonry wall cannot be penetrated cleanly we detail a surface route to match the trim rather than drilling hopefully through limestone. Indoor concealment in those same houses is on our TV mounting and concealment page.

One press, and a plan for February

A screen on a patio is a screen outside. The outdoor room happens when one press brings the display on to the right input, wakes the landscape audio at the level the yard needs, and takes the Lutron landscape lighting to a scene — and the same press in reverse shuts the yard down for the night. We control outdoor displays over the network where the display supports it and over infrared where it does not; Sonos zones join the same scene. Because we hold all three certifications, the layers are ours rather than three vendors pointing at each other.

The last thing worth planning is the off-season. A properly specified outdoor installation stays outdoors all winter and wants very little: the articulation exercised, the terminations checked before the first freeze. We fold that into service visits, which is when we catch a gasket that has aged or a mount that is stiffening. Every install carries a five-year workmanship warranty, the equipment carries its manufacturer warranty, and you have our support for as long as you own the system.

Common questions