I’m at work, kids are at home and the SKY box isn’t working.

The wife has turned it off to reset and it isn’t having any of it. Earlier she had terrestrial channels, now she has nothing. The box is only hooked up to the satellite feed. Any ideas?

The box is an old “white” SKY+ job.

I can’t phone SKY until I get home, but it would be nice to have an idea of what is going on. Box, dish or cable?

Update. Terrestrial is back, no SKY channels and we can’t view any of the recorded programs on our planner.

take viewing card out, give it a wipe, blow the slot, stick it back in.

(aka the nintendo technique)

Go outside and play?

Working again now.

Would water in the cable cause this? The weather has been filthy of late and the dish is quite exposed.

Go outside and play?

Thanks for that.

this usually does the trick for me

On the front of your box, press the SELECT and Image buttons together (you can release the buttons once all the lights appear).
All the lights will turn off and the box will go through a reboot.
The reboot should take approx. 30-60 seconds and will return you back to the channel you last viewed.

water can get in the cable and cause issues. you’ll need to unscrew the cable at the back of the box and check to see if there is any water in there

Thanks for that.

Your welcome 🙂

You’re welcome

FTFY, sarcasm fails if you can’t use grammar appropriately!

^ there won’t be any water in the cable as such, but it’ll be green if there has been water ingress.

Better to check that the point the cable goes into the dish still has a nice layer of self amalgamating tape around it.

That said, just sounds like your box had a mental vacation.

FWIW and not sure if this applies to dishes but.. – I had problems with Freeview (via aerial) which got worse when it rained. Up on the roof, found aerial was loose, realigned, tightened bolts, much better. If you’ve had story weather, is dish still aligned?

There’s a config menu where you can get it to show signal strength. May be worth a peek.

A nice lady from India has just told me how to reset the box. Everything is tickerty-boo and bingerly-bong once again.

If the weather has been really crap, it might just be very heavy rain blocking the signal, which can be for extended periods. Snow is even worse.
This can help with box issues as well: http://help.sky.com/articles/problems-with-your-recordings-and-planner
I use these tips quite a lot, I think my box is starting to die on its ass.

I had one of the old white Sky+ boxes go. Then a similar problem with a Sky HD+ box too.

The reset has probably fixed it temporarily, but prepare yourself for an engineer callout and probably a new box.

The lost signal thing convinces you it’s a dish or cable problem. Both times it’s happened engineer turns up and and says ‘nah mate signal’s fine you need a new box’.

So watch all the stuff you’ve got recorded on the box.