11 reasons your Woodstock garage door isn’t opening or closing

You’re chatting with a friend about making plans as you pull in the driveway of your Woodstock home. Without really thinking about it, you open the app on your phone that controls the garage door and hit the button that will start it rising before you even reach it. In fact, you’ve timed this pantomime to the point that you can just keep on rolling right on into the garage.

Today, however, you have to hit the brakes hard as you very nearly drive right into the garage door. ‘WHAT THE HECK HAPPENED?!!!’

It’s not what happened; it’s what didn’t happen. The garage door did not go up when you pushed the button. You were planning to run in and change before driving over to The Woodstock Square to meet your friend for coffee at Ethereal Confections. But you hit the button again and again and still it sits, not budging at all.

You don’t have time for this. You leave the car in the driveway and go around to the front door. You’ll have to worry about the garage door later. Actually, you’ll probably need to worry about the garage door opener later.

There are a number of reasons that your garage door isn’t opening. Here is a list of 11 possibilities that could explain the problem:

• Somehow, the plug is unplugged and there’s no power
• The limit setting requires adjustment
• The door is off one or both of its tracks
• A torsion spring is broken (without it, the door weighs too much for the opener to open)
• There’s a problem with your remote control or app
• A cable has snapped or is loose
• The disconnect is engaged
• The door is locked
• There is something in the way of the door so it won’t open
• The assembly requires a sensitivity adjustment
• The photoelectric sensor is broken or blocked

That’s quite a list of possible problems. Your best bet is to go through the front door and, if you have time, call a qualified garage door technician before you go meet your friend for dinner. Better garage door repair services offer emergency calls. Or, if it can wait, they’ll come out the next day and put the garage door opener, on your Woodstock garage, back in working order.

Grayslake garage door starts to open the closes indicates possible broken garage door spring

You get the feeling the garage door on your Grayslake home is messing with you. You push the button on your ap to open the garage door and it begins to rise. Bt then, as though you can hear the mechanism laughing at you, it reverses course and goes back down. This is not funny. It’s infuriating, especially if you have an appointment and don’t have time for fun and games.

You press the button again and, maybe it opens. Then again, maybe it does the same thing over again. What would cause the garage door opener to behave so rudely? Before you jump to the conclusion that your Grayslake garage door is possessed, there is a logical explanation.

If your garage door begins to open but then closes instead, the likely culprit is the spring above the door. The spring is designed to help you or the garage door opener to open the garage door by reducing the amount of weight that needs to be lifted. But if the spring is broken or worn, it can loose its strength. More and more weight is left for you or the garage door opener to handle.

This can trigger a problem with the garage door opener. You’ll notice this problem when the garage door begins to open and then closes again.

The first question to ask is the age of the spring above the garage door. If it’s more than three or four years old, it’s possible that the spring is worn. You might be worn too if you were called upon, repeatedly, to carry that kind of weight. Then again, if the door was properly installed in the first place, you may get considerably more years out of your garage door spring.

Whether the garage door spring is a little long in the tooth or not, it’s possible that the spring is broken. While some broken garage door springs are obvious, that’s not always the case; you may want to call in a garage door technician to inspect your garage door spring.

If you do have a worn or broken garage door spring, you definitely want a trained professional to replace the garage door spring. Someone choosing to replace their own garage door spring would want to have someone on hand to call the Grayslake EMTs when an accident happens. Considering the amount of energy contained in a garage door spring, even a broken or worn spring, the likelihood of injury or death is very real. This is not a DIY project. Be safe, call the pros.