Three Common Reasons Your Garage Door Isn’t Opening

Are you having issues with your garage door opening? This can be very frustrating. Especially when you find yourself trying to pull into your garage while it’s pouring rain (as luck would have it). Been there, not fun. There are three common causes for this, and chances are, one of these applies to your garage door.

Let’s discuss the first possible issue.

Many times a garage door can fail to open due to a broken or faulty spring. The health of your garage door spring is vital to allowing your garage door to open. This is because the spring carries a tremendous amount of tension to maintain the weight of your garage door. Importantly, the pull that the spring provides will decrease the amount of work required by the motor. Depending on the weight of your garage door, this can easily exceed what your motor can lift on its own. This can quickly become a problem because it puts strain on the garage door opener, causing it wear out more quickly.

So here’s a good way to test the spring.

First, disconnect the motor and manually lift the garage door. Now let go. Upon releasing the garage door, it should stay in place. Try this from the knee, waist, and shoulder level. This is a torsion spring balance test. If the garage door is too heavy or won’t stay in place after you’ve released it, this is a very good indicator that the spring is the issue. In some cases, if you have broken spring, you won’t be able to lift the garage door at all. When completing this test, be sure to practice caution or, even better, have someone there to hold the other side of the garage door in case it falls suddenly.

The second reason your garage door may not open.

After a while, your garage door opener’s circuit board can go bad. While this can be due to the garage door opener being old and worn out, it is more likely to occur after a lightning storm, which can cause your circuit board to fail. The circuit board is very sensitive to power surges, so it’s very important to make sure your opener is surge protected. If you have recently experienced a storm, this is most likely the culprit. A sign that the circuit board is just going bad will be when your garage door tries to continue opening/closing and not know when to stop. Because testing the circuit involves electricity, be careful of where you touch the opener and wall socket.

The third likely reason your garage door won’t open.

The last reason your garage door may not open could be due to a broken or disconnected cable. To check this, all you need to do is a visual inspection. When your garage door opens or closes, the cable will spool out from or onto the drum. Looking from the inside of your garage, you can locate the drums at the top corner of either side of your garage door. If you have a broken or disconnected cable it will most likely be dangling from the drum. As you can see on the bottom right photo, the cable can hang loose from the drum, preventing it from winding to operate the door. Sometimes the cable can be easily restrung, but you may need the assistance of a garage door technician to ensure that it is repaired correctly.

Contact Us

If you notice any of these issues are causing your garage door not to function, contact us! Our experienced technicians can easily diagnose your problem and come stocked with the equipment to repair your door on site.