Garage door opener repair: what fails and what gets replaced

Most opener faults are one of five things, and only two of them are actually the opener.

The motor runs and nothing moves

This is the classic, and it is nearly always the plastic gear kit inside the motor head. The drive gear has stripped its teeth against the worm, so the motor spins freely and the chain or belt does not. It is a repair: the head comes down, the kit goes in, and the unit runs again.

It is worth asking why it stripped. A gear kit that fails on a door with heavy or broken springs will strip again unless the door is fixed, because the opener is the thing that was carrying the load it was not designed to carry.

The other version of this symptom is a trolley that has come off the carriage, so the rail is running but nothing is attached to the door.

The door stops short, or reverses on the floor

That is settings rather than parts. Every opener has a travel limit telling it where the floor and the ceiling are, and a force setting telling it how hard to push before it decides it has hit something. A door that stops six inches up, or lands and bounces straight back, is usually one of those two drifting or being set for a different door.

Before adjusting force, the door gets checked by hand. Turning the force up to get past a binding door hides a mechanical problem behind a safety setting, and that is the wrong direction.

Nothing happens at all

Power first: the outlet, the breaker, and whether the wall button lights. Then the wall button and its wire, then the logic board and, on older units, the capacitor. A logic board is replaceable on most units, and whether it is worth doing depends on how old the opener is and whether the board is still made.

Remotes and keypads

A remote that has stopped working is usually a battery or a lost pairing, and re-learning it to the motor head takes a minute. A keypad that has stopped is often the same, or water in the housing. Where the receiver itself has failed, a universal external receiver can bring an otherwise sound opener back rather than replacing the whole unit.

The door reverses immediately on closing

That is the photo-eye pair, not the opener. The safety sensor page covers it.

When repair stops making sense

An opener with no safety sensors predates the requirement for them and is replaced rather than repaired. So is one whose parts are no longer made, and one that needs its limits reset every few weeks, because that is usually a symptom of a worn rail or a failing motor rather than a setting that keeps slipping.