7 Reasons Your Garage Door Won't Open and What to Do

It can be a real pain if you arrive home to find that your garage door won’t open. Or worse, your broken garage door traps your car inside the garage, leaving you stranded—probably when you’re already running late to school or work.

There are a few reasons why your garage door won’t open, and it’s important to understand the root of the problem so you can troubleshoot the situation and use your garage again with ease.

1. Lack of Power

If you have an automatic opener, but your garage door won’t open, always check for the simplest explanation first—ensure the opener has electric power. Most automatic openers plug into an outlet. Check that the plug is tight in the outlet.

Next, make sure the outlet has power. If not, you may have tripped a circuit breaker in the electrical panel, or you may need to reset a GFCI outlet somewhere in the garage.

If you are using a garage door remote opener, it may need new batteries.

2. Lock Engaged

Some automatic openers have a lock mode that prevents anyone from opening the door without pressing the buttons in the right sequence. Should someone steal your remote, lock mode could prevent them from entering.

For many openers, you just press and hold the right button on the remote for at least a few seconds to enter and exit lock mode.

Certain garage doors may have a physical lock that you can use with a key. The door may not be opening because someone engaged the physical lock.

3. Faulty Keypad

If the exterior keypad for the garage door opener is malfunctioning, it could cause the entire door mechanism to stop working. This means the garage door won’t open with the remote or with the keypad.

Inspect the keypad. If the plastic case is broken, or if the unit is pulling away from the frame of the home, it could have moisture damage inside the unit. A local garage door opener installer can help if you need to replace a broken keypad.

Some keypads are hard-wired, and the wires serving the keypad may be loose or corroded, which you can see during your inspection. Other keypads run from a battery, meaning you may need to change it.

4. The Door Is Disconnected From the Track

If you hear the garage door motor running but the door is not opening, a disconnected trolley is a common cause.

If you’re wondering how to open a garage door manually without using the automatic opener, you must disengage the trolley first by pulling the emergency handle and rope.

Many systems will automatically re-engage the trolley to the automatic opener system the next time someone pushes the button. However, some systems require you to manually reconnect the two. 

Look at the rope and handle. If they appear to be hanging downward, leaving the trolley disengaged from the system, physically re-engage them. Then try the automatic opener again to see if the door opens.

5. Malfunctioning Opener Hardware

The automatic garage door opener is a box-shaped piece of hardware that hangs from the garage ceiling. If the door will not open, and if you ruled out all the easier potential fixes we mentioned earlier, you could have a malfunctioning unit that will need repair from a garage pro.

Multiple items can go wrong inside the hardware for the opener, including:

• Loose chain: If the chain drive that moves the trolley is loose or broken, it won’t be able to open the garage door.

• Broken gear drive: If the hardware sounds like it’s running and the chain and trolley are moving, but the garage door won’t open, the gear drive inside the hardware probably is broken. This drive engages to lift the door’s weight. A broken gear drive won’t create the tension necessary to open the door.

• Burned-out motor: If nothing happens when you attempt to open the door with the remote or keypad, and if you are sure the unit has power, you may have a burned-out motor. It’s also possible that the circuit board inside the unit is malfunctioning.

These problems will require the work of a garage door opener pro. Installing a garage opener costs $400 on average, while a garage door repair costs about $250.

6. Misaligned Track

Garage doors use a series of tracks to open properly. Tracks along each edge of the door support the rollers connecting to the garage door. A track in the middle allows the automatic opener’s trolley to move back and forth.

When the door seems to be lurching as it attempts to move upward—or when it sticks completely—you may have misaligned tracks. If you hear ugly grinding noises or squeals as the door moves, this could indicate tracks starting to pull loose.

Try examining your tracks. If you can see obvious gaps or areas where different pieces of the tracks are pulling apart from each other, the garage door likely won’t open. Look for loose bolts that explain the misalignment. You often can tighten the bolts or reattach them to fix the alignment issue.

You should spray a lubricant along the tracks once or twice a year to help the door move along the tracks more freely. Lubricant alone will not fix a misalignment problem, however.

7. Broken Springs

Another one of the key parts of a garage door that allows it to open properly is the spring mechanism. Your garage door may have extension springs or torsion springs. If these springs become worn, they cannot create the tension needed to open the garage door.

Although you can add lubrication to the springs, eventually, they wear out and fail. Most of the time, a problem with garage door springs requires replacement.

Springs that are close to failing may make loud popping sounds as you open and close the garage door. An automatic opener may sound like it is straining when the springs are worn.

Because these springs carry a lot of tension, you should not handle them yourself or attempt a repair. You could suffer a serious injury if the spring suddenly releases all of its tension.

So, who fixes garage doors and openers? You can reach out to a local garage door repair company to help you repair or replace hardware, like the opener, the keypad, the tracks, or the springs.