Garage Door Won't Open or Close? Work Through This List

A door that won’t move is either a power problem, an opener problem, or a door problem. The list below runs in that order because that’s the order of cheap to expensive. About a third of the time the fix is free and takes two minutes.

First, the free stuff

1. Try the wall button. If the wall button works but the remote doesn’t, the door is fine. You have a dead remote battery or a cleared remote code. Swap the coin cell before you do anything else.

2. Check the lock button. Most wall consoles have a lock (or “vacation”) button that disables all remotes. Kids and elbows find it. If the wall button opens the door but nothing else does, hold or toggle the lock button and try again.

3. Look at the outlet. Openers plug into a ceiling outlet that’s often on a GFCI circuit shared with the garage’s outlets. If a freezer, block heater, or Christmas-light mishap tripped the GFCI, the opener has no power. Find the outlet with the reset button, sometimes by the door to the house, and reset it.

4. Power out entirely? After a Superior gale takes the lines down, the door still opens by hand. There’s a red release cord for exactly this. We wrote a separate power-outage walkthrough with the safe order of operations.

Next, the sensors

5. Check the little lights. Near the floor on each side of the opening sit two safety sensors. Each has an LED. If one is dark or blinking, the pair isn’t seeing eye to eye: a snow shovel got leaned into one, frost fog is on a lens, or a bracket got nudged. Square them up until both LEDs are solid, wipe the lenses, and try the door.

A sensor problem has a signature: the door opens fine but won’t close, or it starts closing and pops back up, often with the opener light flashing. That signature means you can skip to step 5 next time.

Now the door itself

6. The bang test. Think back a day or two. Did anyone hear a single loud bang from the garage, like something heavy fell? That’s usually a torsion spring letting go. Look at the spring above the door. A healthy spring is one continuous coil, and a broken one has a visible two-inch gap.

7. The weight test. With the door fully closed, pull the red release cord and try lifting the door by hand. A healthy door floats up with one hand. If it feels like lifting a refrigerator lid, stop lifting. That’s a broken or failed spring, the door genuinely weighs 150+ pounds right now, and the opener was never the problem. Spring replacement is a same-day repair in most of Marquette County.

8. Frozen down? A U.P. special: meltwater refreezes overnight and welds the bottom seal to the slab. The opener strains, clicks off, and the door never budges. Don’t keep hitting the button, or the opener will strip its main gear trying. Break the ice seal along the bottom edge with a plastic scraper and patience. Hot water works too, but it refreezes into a skating rink. Next warm spell, replace the bottom seal so it stops happening.

When it’s time to call

Call when any of these are true:

• The weight test failed (broken spring, so don’t lift it or force it)
• The door is crooked, off its track, or a cable is hanging loose
• The opener hums or grinds but nothing moves (stripped gear)
• Everything checks out and it still won’t run

Describe which step failed and you’ll get a real diagnosis on the phone, plus the likely cost from our published price table, in writing before anyone drives out.