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Digital Menu Board Installation in Katy, TX 77493
Two questions decide almost every Katy menu board job. Can people actually read it from where they stand or sit? And can we install it without shutting you down for a day you cannot afford? Everything else — screens, mounts, software — follows from those. This page answers both with numbers rather than adjectives.
ZIP 77493 hands us two completely different buildings
North and west Katy is two eras stacked in one postcode. There is the original townsite near the rail line — small wood-frame and masonry buildings, converted houses, the occasional metal shop bay, most of them wired for a very different business than the one operating in them now. Then there are the pads along Katy-Hockley Cut Off, Clay Road and the Cane Island and Elyson frontages, where the concrete is younger than some of our tools.
The older buildings give us easy framing and almost no wall depth. Wood studs take blocking readily, but a two-by-four wall with brick veneer outside leaves nowhere to recess a display, so those jobs go low-profile surface mount and hide the cabling in a shallow chase or a painted raceway. The newer pads give us plenty of cavity and no framing worth anchoring to, so backing gets added before anything hangs. Same service, opposite problems.
How big the type has to be before anyone can actually read it
This is the part that gets skipped, and it is the reason some menu boards simply do not work. Start from the reading distance, not from the screen.
A workable planning figure for a menu someone has to read and decide from is about one inch of capital-letter height for every ten feet of viewing distance. Glancing at a single word tolerates far less; comparing six items and a price does not.
Turn that into pixels and it becomes checkable before anyone buys anything. A 55-inch panel is roughly 27 inches tall, so at 1080 lines you have about 40 pixels for every inch of screen height. A 43-inch panel is about 21 inches tall — roughly 51 pixels per inch.
| Where the reader is | Cap height to aim for | On a 55-inch 1080p panel |
|---|---|---|
| At the counter, about 6 ft | Around 0.6 in | Roughly 25 px capitals |
| Mid-queue, about 12 ft | Around 1.2 in | Roughly 48 px capitals |
| Back of the line, about 20 ft | Around 2 in | Roughly 80 px capitals |
| Driver at an outdoor board | Larger again | Glare and motion eat legibility |
Run your own artwork through that arithmetic and a hard truth appears: three 1080p screens do not hold three times a printed menu. They hold considerably less. The boards that work carry fewer lines, bigger type and rotating detail, and they move the long descriptions to a printed card at the counter.
Two more things decide readability in a real room. Contrast direction — light type on a dark field usually reads better on a lit screen indoors, while a sun-washed position often does better the other way round. And viewing angle: your queue is rarely square to the wall, and panel types differ in how much contrast they lose off-axis, which is worth checking on the spec sheet rather than in the store.
Retrofitting a drive-thru without closing the restaurant
Most Katy drive-thru work we do is a replacement, not a first install, and the operator cannot give up a lunch. The sequence is what keeps you trading.
Leave the old board running
Where there is room, the new pier goes in beside the existing board and the old one keeps working until the new screen is commissioned. Changeover then costs one slow hour instead of a day.
Bore or trench — pick deliberately
Getting power and data across a live lane is either an open cut or a directional bore. An open cut is quicker and cheaper if you can give up a lane for a shift. A bore costs more and leaves no patch joint, which matters because a patch across a drive lane is the first thing to ravel and pond under a few thousand turning tyres.
Find the vehicle loop before cutting
There is an induction loop under that pavement feeding your timer. Saw-cutting through it is a same-day outage of your timing data plus a separate repair. It gets located and marked before anything starts.
Let the concrete reach strength
A pier is not ready because it looks dry. The board goes on after the pour has reached the strength the drawing calls for, which is why the pier is poured on one visit and the board set on another.
Why an outdoor board leans, and what keeps it plumb
Katy sits on expansive clay. It swells when the rain comes and shrinks hard through an August drought, and everything shallow rides that movement up and down through the year. A board bolted to an under-depth footing will be visibly out of plumb inside two seasons, and the sign itself is the part everyone blames.
The fix is depth, not mass. The pier has to reach below the zone that moves seasonally, with the actual depth and reinforcement taken from the manufacturer’s foundation detail and any geotechnical guidance for the site rather than from habit. Grade gets sloped away from the pier so the collar is not sitting in standing water after every storm.
The conduit stub deserves the same care. Leave slack and a sweep at the base, and use an expansion fitting anywhere the run crosses from moving soil into a slab, so ground movement pulls on a fitting designed to take it rather than shearing a conductor you cannot see.
What we check in an older Katy building before quoting
Before we price a conversion in the original townsite or an older Clay Road building, we open the electrical panel and look at the ceiling. Those two checks set most of the number.
- Spare capacity and honest labelling. Older panels are often full and the labels frequently describe a previous tenant’s equipment. We trace rather than trust.
- What shares the circuit. A board on the same circuit as an ice machine or a reach-in compressor will see a voltage dip every time that motor starts. It rarely kills a player outright; it shortens its life and produces intermittent faults nobody can reproduce.
- Ceiling type. Lay-in grid is easy. A hard lid or an exposed metal-building deck changes the pathway entirely, and pathway is usually the biggest single line on an older-building quote.
- What the wall really is. Shiplap behind drywall, a furred masonry face, an added partition with no top plate — each one changes how a mount is anchored.
- The internet service and the router. A landlord-supplied gateway with no ability to separate networks limits how we can place players, and we would rather know that in the estimate than at commissioning.
How the install day is sequenced
A straightforward indoor board in Katy is usually one day. We arrive with the wall already surveyed, add or confirm backing, set mounts against a laser line so the row is level across its full length, pull and terminate cable, hang panels, mount players where a hand can still reach them, then dress and label everything.
Commissioning decides whether you call us again. We switch off overscan so the picture maps pixel for pixel, set brightness for the light your room genuinely has, match the white point across adjacent panels, load the daypart schedule and overnight power-down, then stand at the back of the queue and read the board. If a price is hard to read from there, the content changes before we leave. Credentials go to you, not to us.
The variables that move a Katy estimate
There is no list price for this, and the on-site estimate is free precisely because the building decides the number. What we are measuring:
- Screen count, size and indoor versus weather-rated
- Whether anchoring backing already exists
- Pathway type — open grid, hard lid, conduit or raceway
- How far the network gear sits from the furthest board
- Electrical work needed, and whether a circuit must be added
- Bore versus open cut for anything crossing a drive lane
- Pier depth and site restoration outdoors
- Phasing to keep you open during service
- Players, licences and how many content zones you want
- Content design, if your artwork needs resizing to be readable
Five mistakes that cost Katy operators a second visit
Overscan quietly crops the bottom row
Many displays enlarge the incoming picture slightly by default, pushing a few percent of every edge off-screen. Your top header and your bottom price line are exactly what disappears. Setting the picture mode to a true one-to-one scan takes seconds and is missed constantly.
Type sized on a designer’s desk
Artwork approved at arm’s length on a laptop looks authoritative and reads as grey mush from twenty feet. Approve menu artwork at the distance customers stand, full size, on the actual screen.
The board shares a circuit with the ice machine
Intermittent reboots that nobody can reproduce, always during service, because that is when the compressor cycles hardest.
The trench patch ponds
A shallow, poorly compacted patch across a drive lane holds water, then ravels under turning traffic. It becomes a landlord conversation long before the screen ever fails.
No spare conduit for the second lane
Stores that later add a second lane or a pre-sell board find the pathway was sized for exactly what existed on day one. A spare conduit and a pull string cost almost nothing while the trench is open.
Related services
Frequently asked questions
How many screens do we actually need above the counter?
Fewer than most people assume, and the answer comes from reading distance rather than wall width. Work out the furthest point a customer decides from, size the capitals for it, then see how many lines fit. Most counters land on two or three screens with a rotating panel for specials. We do that arithmetic during the free estimate, so you are not buying a fourth screen to hold type nobody can read.
Can we keep serving while you replace the drive-thru board?
Usually yes. Where the site allows it we set the new pier beside the existing board and leave the old one live until the new screen is commissioned, so the swap costs an hour rather than a service. Where the lane must be crossed, we either bore under it or schedule the open cut for your quietest window. We agree the sequence before work starts, not on the morning.
Will an outdoor screen really survive a Katy summer?
A display built for outdoor service will. It is a sealed, thermally managed assembly with high brightness and an ambient sensor, engineered for direct sun and humidity. An indoor panel in a weatherproof box will not — it throttles, washes out, and eventually collects condensation. The enclosure is not the hard part; the panel’s own thermal design is.
Our building is from the seventies. Is the wiring going to be a problem?
Not usually a problem, but nearly always a line item. Older Katy buildings tend to have full panels, inherited labelling and circuits already carrying kitchen equipment. We trace what actually feeds the area, and where a dedicated circuit is warranted your licensed electrician adds it. We are a low-voltage contractor and coordinate that work rather than performing it.
Can our prices update automatically from the POS?
With some combinations, yes — several content platforms pull items and prices from a point-of-sale system, so one change updates the board. It depends on which POS and which signage platform you run, so settle it before buying either. Where no integration exists, a well-built board still lets one person change a price from a phone in under a minute.
Free on-site estimate in Katy
We will measure the room, read your current menu from the back of the queue and tell you what it would take to make it work. Licensed, insured and based in the Katy area since 2004.
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