The garage door won't open, any suggestions?

A similar situation happened to me this week. I finally realized that the wall-mounted garage door opener has a lock button on it. I must have accidentally pressed it when opening the door to take the bin out. It then made sense why neither of the remotes didn’t work.

When you press the button, do you hear the motor on the gdo run?
Many garages also have a latch that can secure the door. Is that engaged?
there is a string coming down from the gdo. Has that been pulled?

I got my car stuck in my garage like that one time. I was in the breezeway bathroom when the spring went, but I think I would have heard that particular sound anywhre in the house. It made a HUGE noise. I knew by the sound that it was something round, so I went out to investigate. The spring was still up, but in pieces. I had to call a door company. It took them two days, and in the meantime, I was trapped. You have to go out and look around and see if you can spot the problem first. Then, you may end up having to call a repair man.
Good luck.

Try un-plugging the unit.
Thus allowing it to re-set its self.
Might just be a garbled bunch of data…

If you’ve tried all of the above and nothing has fixed it, the remotes might need to re-learn the frequencies of the GDO. The eHow is here; Your GDO will either have a learn button or a set of small (small-small) switches. Take the cover off the back of your GDO remote and find the learn button or switches (They are both small-small inside of the remote). Some remotes may have both, especially if you go out to Wall-e-Mart and get a new remote.

Steps 2 and 3 correspond to the learner-button devices. In step 3, you may have to press the button repeatedly (but in slow, 1–2 second intervals, just to make sure you don’t press it too many times) instead of holding it down to teach the device. You’ll know when you’ve pressed the button enough when the light on the GDO blinks for a bit. Test to check if it works.

Steps 4 and 5 correspond to the switch-type openers. If your remote has more switches than the GDO does, set the extras to 0. Test.

Learner buttons are, well, buttons. The one on the GDO is usually the most visible button on the GDO.

Switches are very small and narrow, and I’ll get pictures of both of these in the remote once the one I can open gets back home. Someone is in that car at the moment.

When you press the button, you do not hear the motor on the unit.
The door latch has not been engaged.
The string has not been pulled.
I can’t unplug it or check on the door opener without breaking into the garage (breaking the window??) which is not happening until we have a plan to replace whatever needs to be broken for us to get into the garage.
@Fred931 We also have a key pad in the kitchen. Would the remotes need to be re-frequencied (or whatever) if the key pad also doesn’t open the door??

Thanks everyone.

@Fred931 Nevermind. I just read your link. Since we can’t get into the garage, we can’t press any buttons on the opener to reprogram the remotes.

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough… we cannot get into our garage. At all. Looks like we’ll have to either break in to figure it out ourselves or hire someone. :(

If you don’t hear the engine run, either the motor is toast, or the fuse is blown. Either way, you’re gonna have to break in.

Okay @Cupcake…will you let us know how you finally got into the garage and what the problem was?

@Pied_Pfeffer Funny you ask because we have a repeat of the problem again!

There is some kind of lock on the inside of the garage that locks the garage door and shuts it. This lock apparently gets hit when our teenager gets his bike out of the garage. The part that I don’t understand is why that kind of lock would be installed and active in a garage with no other access point.

My hubby taped up one of the glass panels on the door and broke it… hoisted up the teenager through the window and the kiddo climbed in and opened the door. This time, though, the teenager has a broken arm so hubby had to rig up something to unlock the door through the (broken) window pane.