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When the garage remote stops working

You press the button in the driveway and nothing happens. Before you assume the opener has died, know that most of these calls come down to three ordinary things: a flat coin cell, a safety beam that has been nudged out of line, or a remote that has fallen out of step with its motor. All three are worth checking yourself, and none of them need tools.

First, work out which half has stopped

An automatic door is two things: a handset that sends a signal, and a motor unit that listens for it. Almost every fault sits clearly in one half or the other, and one press tells you which.

• Try the wall button. If the door runs normally from the button inside the garage, the motor and the door are fine and the problem is the handset or the signal. If the wall button does nothing either, it is the opener or its power.
• Try the second remote. Most households have two. If one works and the other doesn't, you have your answer without touching anything else.
• Watch the opener's light. Many units flash the courtesy light or a small indicator in a pattern when they are refusing to close for a reason. A door that runs up happily but will not stay down is almost always telling you about its safety beams, not its motor.

If an app schedule or light timer has been running an hour off since the clocks changed, our daylight saving guide covers what to check.

The battery, which really is the answer this often

Most garage remotes run on a single small coin-cell battery, and they fade rather than die: the range shortens first, so you find yourself creeping closer to the door before it responds. If you have been pressing the button twice lately, that is the tell. The cover usually slides or unclips without a screwdriver, and the battery type is printed on the cell itself. One note worth passing on: coin-cell batteries are a serious swallowing hazard for small children, so keep the new ones and the dead ones well out of reach and dispose of them properly.

The beams across the opening

Down near the floor on both sides of the opening sits a pair of infrared sensors. While the door is closing they watch the gap, and anything that breaks the beam sends the door back up. In Australia the electrical safety of powered residential garage door drives is covered by its own standard, AS/NZS 60335.2.95, and the protections it describes are the reason your door refuses to close on an obstruction.

When a door will open but not close, the beams are the first thing to look at. Around here the usual culprits are a spider web spun across a lens overnight, low afternoon sun sitting straight in one eye, a bracket knocked by a mower or a bike wheel, or a leaf drift after a storm. Wipe both lenses, clear the floor of the opening, and check the two units are still pointing at each other. Most have a small indicator light that goes steady when they are aligned.

What is never the fix is taping over a sensor, unplugging one, or holding the wall button down to force the door through. The beams are the part that stops a closing door on a child, a pet or a bumper bar. A door that only closes with its safety bypassed is a door waiting to hurt someone.

Rolling codes, and why re-syncing works

Modern remotes do not send the same code twice. Each press generates a fresh code, and the motor accepts it only once, which is what stops someone parked down the street from recording your signal and replaying it later. It is good security, and it has one everyday side effect: a handset and a motor can drift out of step, usually after a power cut, a battery change, or a remote that has spent months in a drawer.

The cure is re-pairing the handset to the motor rather than replacing it, and it is generally a matter of pressing a learn button on the motor unit and then the remote within a short window. The sequence differs by brand and by age, so check the manual for your unit or ask us rather than guessing at it. The same goes for cheap universal remotes bought online: some will pair with your motor and some will never talk to it at all, so it pays to check compatibility before the parcel arrives.

When the opener runs but the door misbehaves

If the motor whirrs and the door barely moves, or the door starts down and reverses partway with nothing in the opening, the trouble has moved from the signal to the door itself. Openers have a force limit precisely so they give up instead of forcing a door that has gone stiff or out of balance. That is the opener reporting a problem, not causing one, and our guide to why a door goes heavy explains what is going on underneath.

Where the checklist stops

Everything above is safe to look at with the door still. The springs, the cables and the brackets they anchor to are not on that list. A wound spring holds the whole weight of the door as tension in steel, and released carelessly it lets go faster than anyone can move: the medical literature carries case reports of severe eye injuries from mishandled garage door springs. If a cable has come off its drum, a spring has let go with a bang, or the door has dropped or gone crooked in its tracks, stop using it, keep the opening clear, and book it in.

If none of it works

Then it is a proper opener job, and that is ordinary work: motors have a lifespan, circuit boards fail, and units that came with the house are often older than the car parked under them. We look at the whole system, tell you plainly whether it is a repair or a replacement, and price it before anything happens.