My remote stopped working in the dark. I have directv dvr. I explained problem to directv & they sent me a new receiver and remote. I opened the new box, set it up just fine. While the new remote was the same as my old one I used the old remote because it was handy. I went through the setup just fine. Later in the evening while still using the old remote my new receiver stopped working in the dark. I tried the new remote but I guess it was too late. Is it possible that the remote is damaging the infared sensor in the receivers. Now I have two receivers that will only respond to the remotes in a well lighted room. Totally non responsive with the lights off. Please help.

You probably have an LCD or plasma TV. This interferes with the remote operation. Take something like a paper towel roll and aim the remote through the core with the remote touching the core of the towel. The remote will work, It would be nearly perfectly dark.

The design of the DVR doesn't reject the light generated from the TV. With the TV on in a lighted room the signal (ambient light) to noise (TV) ratio is hiig, therefore it's a non-issue. When the interferenece is just noise the IR receiver can't reject it. Newer equipment USUALLY does not have these problems.

An acqaintance of mine designed a sensor for an obsolete piece of equipment because of this issue.

You can fix this problem with an IR repeater.

If you want to, I would need to know the number of pieces of equipment that you have and their proximity to each other.

What you would do is self-stick tape emitters on each of the IR sensors. Run it to a few boxes and put an IR receiver somewhere aimable. You have options to allow or not allow IR signals to pass through. You don't allow IR pass through.

So, the new IR receiver (about 3" x 1" x 3") processes the signals and it's circuitry is immune to the interference from the TV.

Want to go further?

While the above is a nice explanation... it takes a lot to fix it the way it's described.

I had the same problem, and I just switched my remote to work on "RF" instead of "IR". If your remote has an "R" (or "R" and another letter after it) at the end of it on the top left, it has RF capability. Just go to the setup/remote control section on your DVR (with the lights on, so you can control it!). It will tell you how to enable your RF. Now mine works like a charm.

Not that DirecTV knows about this, given the fact that I called them and they pretended I was a moron - even the tech guys. It seems this problem is fairly common, though, as I have seen numerous complaints on other message boards.

I'm having the same problem, but as it happens it will then go away on its own for no apparent reason, and under exactly the same lighting conditions, with the TV on. I did notice a curious pattern of it happening in the morning when I have minimal lighting in the room and not really happening at night when I usually have more lighting in the room. But then I did a test tonight (same lighting as in the morning - this is well past sundown), and at first the test seemed to indicate low lighting in the room was a problem. The remote wasn't causing the receiver to change channels, etc... then out of the blue it started working again as if there was never a problem.

(As a side note, I have black out curtains in my living room so virtually no light gets through.)

So, I'm back at square one as to what the cause is. Definitely is NOT the lighting in the room and it definitely is not my 3-year-old LCD TV causing this - otherwise why then does it now work again? This didn't even start happening until about 3 or 4 months ago and I always get up well before sunrise so that's not it either. When I first got the receiver _just_ over a year ago, everything worked like a charm at all hours of the day and I used to get up even earlier than I do now (so outside light was never a factor in any of this).

Something about either the remote or the receiver is flaky and needs to be replaced and I really think it's the receiver. Has a very weak LCD receiver built into it.

Sorry if this is a moronic question but I am curious as to when you last changed the batteries in the remote?

Hello Don,


Not a moronic question. I tried brand new batteries and then found out there was no difference.

By the way, I was critical of the person who posted the idea of it being caused by the LCD TV, so I want to apologize for being harsh.

However, it truly doesn't seem directly related to that but I cannot account for the unpredictable behavior that occurs when sometimes I'm able to turn change channels, etc... if the TV is on, but sometimes not able to.

Obviously, the TV has to be on if you want to see what channel you're currently on and want to change to.

The lighting in the room seemed to affect it a bit, but then that idea crashed when I was able to change channels with the lights off - which is where I thought I was running into the problem.

Like I said before, I had the DirecTV box over a year, but really didn't notice the problem until around September of last year.

Hard to pinpoint this one as it's resisting my attempts to arrive at a solution by testing scenarios.