Add new 4-tuner before old 2-tuner dies

General Discussion
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Have had a 2-tuner with 1TB hard drive since October 2014 - 5 years and 4 months. Old one works fine. I have liftetime guide. Today, wife decided 4-Tuner would be a good idea. So, my plan would be to keep old Tablo up and running on our network. We would turn off recording and just watch stuff until we had deleted everything. We would add a new 4-tuner Tablo with a new hard drive. Maybe a refurbished. Set it to start recording. Both would be on our network.

Once the old one was mostly empty, maybe I would use it for my shows and the new one would be for wife’s shows. Or old one would be for sports or some other logic like this.

Anyone done something like this and have some insight into things I have not considered?

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Since you have the lifetime guide service and are grandfathered in, you will need to contact Tablo Support to add the new 4 tuner to your account. You will not have to pay for a second guide subscription, but if you want commercial skip, you will have to pay for it on a per device basis.

Otherwise, there shouldn’t be any problem having two Tablo’s on your network. I’ve been running two 4 tuner units on my network for over two years with no problems.

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Thanks. How did you decide what to record on each Tablo? Do you have the same channels on each one?

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Basically, I use one for NBC, CBS & PBS. I use the second one for ABC, FOX, CW & most of the sub channels. This way I avoid most recording conflicts. I still occasionally have a conflict, but it can easily be fixed by changing that one series to the other Tablo.

I record a lot of the old TV shows on the sub channels, use Tablo Ripper to copy them to my computer and then edit out the commercials and save them to my NAS for viewing using PLEX. I currently have around 10,000 TV episodes from 90+ different series and still building.

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I did something similar, started with a 2 tuner, added a 4 tuner I bought used off of someone on these forums. Initially I had ‘my stuff’ on the old 2 and the house stuff on the 4, but recently I’ve transitioned to just using the 4…the 4 tuner has never had any recording conflicts…I keep the 2 on in case I at some point have a recording conflict that I need an extra tuner for, but haven’t had need for it yet.

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