What to Do When Your Garage Door Won’t Open or Close with the Remote

So you’ve arrived home and your garage door won’t open. You begin to worry, but once you get inside, the wall switch operates the door fine. Or you wake up in the morning and have no problem opening the door with the mechanism on the wall, but once you roll down your driveway and try to close it with the remote, it won’t work. Whatever your particular situation, it points to a problem with your garage door opener remote. Luckily, this is generally one of the least expensive and easy problems to solve regarding garage doors. By checking the following items, you can narrow your problem down and figure out a solution.

Before focusing on your remote itself, check a few things:

•     Does the door still open with the wall switch? This is a major factor. If your garage door opens like normal when you hit the wall switch, but doesn’t budge when you use the remote, it’s a sign that the problem is contained to the remote itself. 

•     Is this an ongoing problem or a sudden one? Has this been going on for a while or did it just start? Does it happen occasionally or all the time? 

•     Can you get your door to open and close by repeatedly using the remote? If you use extreme patience and keep hitting your remote over and over again, pointed at different angles at the door, can you eventually get it to work? This can help point you to a cause. 

•     Is your garage door performing normally? Or are you noticing it sticking, moving extra slowly, moving up and down crookedly, or making more noise than usual? All of these signs can clue you in that something is wrong with your garage door or the mechanism that controls it, instead of just being limited to a problem with the remote.