Garage Door Ghost

As long as we've been living in a house we've used the garage door as a primary entrance to the house.  A couple of weeks ago on a Saturday morning we awoke to a door that wouldn't open.  The garage door opener started to open and then just gave up and the door slammed back to the ground.  After making a few calls I settled on Dave's Garage Doors for the repair.  What made that an even better choice is that they would do the repair that day, on Saturday! We selected a high cycle set of springs for the 16' door since that's our primary entrance.  The 8' door is on it's first spring since it's installation 14years ago while this is the 3rd set on the 16' door.  When the installation was complete it was impressive how quiet the opener is.   The tension is so nicely balanced that the door can be lifted open with a single finger when disconnected from the opener - nice!

Problem solved...no more garage door worries....

Wrong!

A couple of days later one of the remote control openers stopped working reliably.  Actually it reached the point where it wouldn't work at all.  The first thing we did is to replace the battery and then reprogram the opener with the code for the remote.  It seemed obvious that this should have resolve the problem.  It really didn't help.  A few times the remote control would work but not reliably.  I did a little shopping for the Chamberlain 971LM remote control and found the best deal through a vendor on Amazon.com.  I ordered a pair of new remotes, including shipping, for about the same cost as one remote from the Chamberlain web site.  The remotes arrived and I reprogrammed the garage door opener with the two remotes and figured the entire issue was complete.

Mystery Open

For the next few days we experienced mystery openings of the garage door.  We assumed it was related to the closing force setting on the garage door after getting the spring replaced.  It's always a diagnostic challenge when two or more parameters are changed and behavior is modified - which one caused the difference?  The good thing is that my wife was paying attention and noticed a pattern.  Mid-morning the door would open.  When I was talking with her on the phone from my office, she stopped the discussion when the garage door was opening.  She quickly went to the window and noticed a neighbor's car was headed down the street and their garage door was closing while ours was opening.  The time of day clearly matched a number of mystery openings. I looked up the opener on the manufacturers web site and found a description of the process to clear memory of all remotes.  I then reprogrammed all of the remotes we have. So far, the mystery openings have stopped.