Garage door won't open

"Won't open" covers several different failures, and some of them need no technician. Start with what the door and the opener do when you press the button. That one observation sorts most cases.

Nothing at all: no light, no sound

The opener is not getting power or not getting the signal.

• Check the outlet and the breaker. Openers plug into a ceiling outlet, and a tripped breaker or a ground-fault outlet elsewhere in the garage can cut it.
• Try the wall button. If the wall button works and the remote does not, the remote's battery is the first suspect.
• Look for a lock setting on the wall control. Many wall controls have a lock or vacation switch that stops remotes from working.

If the opener has power and still does nothing, the fault is in the opener, and that is a call.

The opener hums or runs, and the door does not move

Either the door is disconnected from the opener or the door is too heavy for it to lift. See Opener runs but the door won't move. Before anything else, look at the springs above the door or along the tracks for a gap.

The door lifts a few inches, then stops or reverses

This is a common sign of a broken spring. The opener feels the full weight of the door and its safety system stops it. Do not keep pressing the button and do not lift the door by hand.

The door starts, then jams crooked or grinds

One side has lost its lift or its guide. See snapped cable and off track.

In a hard freeze

Cold weather brings its own version. The rubber seal along the bottom of the door can freeze to the floor, and the door stays put. The fix is to free the seal, not to run the opener harder; a door that still will not rise once the seal is free has a mechanical problem like any other. Searches for this problem have spiked during at least two cold waves. NOAA reports that the arctic air mass of January 14 to 18, 2024 broke nearly 2,500 county records for daily low temperatures; that week the Google Trends index for "garage door won't open" in the United States stood at about twice its median of the previous eight weeks (our reading of the index).

When the problem is the door, not the opener

The federal text printed in every residential opener's manual is blunt about the parts under tension:

Have a qualified service person make repairs to cables, spring assemblies and other hardware.

— 16 CFR 1211.16(b)(2)

And the Consumer Product Safety Commission adds that a door that binds or sticks "should be serviced by a professional" (CPSC Pub. 523). Power, batteries and a lock switch are yours to check. Springs, cables and a jammed door are not.

Updated 2026-09-30.