Don’t Neglect Your Home’s Most Important Door

Posted on: 8 September 2020

Your garage door remote allows you to easily open your garage door without having to go through the labor-intensive process of manually opening your garage door. If your garage door remote isn't working properly, there are a few things you can troubleshoot before you call in the experts.

Reason #1: Dead Battery

The most common reason why a garage door remote stops working is simply that the battery has died. The batteries inside of a remote often last for years, as the remote requires very little energy. However, all that daily use is eventually going to wear down the batteries inside of the remote.

Generally, if your remote has an indicator light, you will notice the light looking dimmer over time as the battery loses its juice. You may also notice that the light stops blinking when you press the button on your remote.

In this case, all you need to do is open the back of the remote and change out the batteries.

Reason #2: Change the Lightbulbs in Your Garage

If you have changed the light bulbs in your garage recently to LED bulbs and you notice that your remote control isn't functioning properly soon after, the issue may be the light bulbs that you are using in your garage.

Your opener works by sending out a radio frequency to the receiving device. Some LED light bulbs have drivers inside of the bulb that creates a little bit of a field that gets in the way of the radio signal sent out by your controller.

This is a simple issue to fix. You are going to have to switch out the LED light bulbs you have in your garage for some different LED lights. Oftentimes, cheaper LED light bulbs are designed to work on the same frequency as your controller and don't have shields in place to block the radio signal.

However, more expensive LED light bulbs are often built with a shield inside of them that will stop them from getting in the way of radio waves, like the ones used by your opener.

Try changing the light bulbs in your garage and see if your opener starts functioning correctly again.

Reason #3: Check the Safety Sensors

Third, you may have an issue with the safety sensors in your garage. The safety sensors are designed to stop your garage from opening and closing when something is within their line of sight.

Sometimes, the safety sensors malfunction. The mounts for the sensors may have gotten bumped, causing the sensors to be misaligned. Something may be wrong with the hardware that holds the sensors in place. Or the wiring for the sensors may be bad.

If your garage door opener still isn't working after you change out the batteries and make sure your LED lights have a shield that stops them from interfering with radio waves, it is time to call in the experts. They can fix any issues with your safety sensors that may be causing your opener to malfunction and get to the bottom of the issue.

For more information, contact a garage door repair service in your area today.