How often should I refresh my DIRECTV receiver?

Are you having problems with the DIRECTV Guide? Is the receiver acting fishy? Are you getting strange error messages like “721?” Refreshing your receiver can fix a lot of problems. The best part is that you can do it by yourself, day or night, right from the web.

Here’s how you do it

  1. First, go to DIRECTV’s “My Equipment” page. (you must be logged into your directv.com account.)
  2. Click “Refresh Receiver” next to the image of the receiver you want to refresh. If you don’t know which one to choose, you can do all of them but DIRECTV’s system may make you wait a few minutes between each.
  3. Try this up to 3 times for each receiver and give it 5 minutes between each to make sure it works.
  4. If that does not work, confirm that the access card number listed at directv.com is the same as listed on the setup page (Menu, Settings&Help, Settings)
  5. If that does not work, unfortunately you will need to call Solid Signal at 888-233-7563 or contact DIRECTV.

But I’ve told you all that before. The real question is, how often should you do it?

It doesn’t hurt to refresh your receiver.

Refreshing your receiver will never lead to something bad happening. If you want to be secure or if you just enjoy doing this sort of thing, you could do it every day. It’s not going to break something in the receiver to do it.

However, there are limits.

The DIRECTV web site won’t let you refresh a receiver more than once every five minutes, and it will create error flags if you do it more than three times a day. This could lead down the road to a call from DIRECTV support just to make sure everything is ok, and that would end up wasting everyone’s time.

However, if you wanted to refresh your receiver three times a day, every day for a month, there’s absolutely no harm in it.

Does a “preemptive” refresh help?

Sadly, refreshing your receiver isn’t like an apple a day. It’s not going to keep the problems away. Refreshing only sends the kind of information that your receiver automatically gets about once a week anyway. It’s not actually going to solve problems before you know they’re problems.

Still, if you’re bored…

Let’s put the cards on the table. You would need to be PRETTY bored to refresh your receiver a couple of times a day for a month. But, as I said there’s no harm in it.

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.