Garage Door Won't Open?
Start Here.

First, split the fault in two

Before you touch anything, press the wall button once, then watch and listen. “Won't open” covers two very different faults, and which one you have decides whether this is a five-minute check or a phone call:

• The opener does nothing at all. No light, no hum, no click. That points to power or the controls: the outlet, the breaker, the wall console or the remote.
• The motor runs but the door stays put. Now the problem sits between the opener and the door: the door's own hardware, or a trolley that has been disconnected from the chain or belt.

The most dangerous cause in the second group is a broken spring. If there is any chance that is what you are looking at, read the safety box below before you put a hand on the door.

1. Check power and the lock button

Start with the dull stuff, because it is often the answer. Is the opener plugged in, and is the outlet live? Plug a lamp or a phone charger into it to find out. Check the breaker panel, and look for a GFCI outlet in the garage that may have tripped. One tripped GFCI can cut power to several outlets at once, including the one the opener is plugged into.

Then look at the wall console. Most have a lock or vacation button that shuts off the remotes, and on some models the door as well. It is easy to press with a shoulder or a coat sleeve without noticing. If the console shows a lock light, or the remotes all stopped at the same moment, that is your first suspect. Our guide to a remote that has stopped working covers the lock button and the other remote faults in more detail.

2. Is the emergency release pulled?

Look up at the rail that runs from the opener to the door. Hanging from the trolley, the carriage that travels along that rail and connects to the top of the door, is a red cord with a handle. Pulling it disconnects the door from the opener so it can be moved by hand during a power cut.

If the motor runs and the chain or belt moves along the rail but the door does not, the trolley has almost certainly been released. Someone may have pulled it during an outage and forgotten, or a child may have treated it as a swing.

How to re-engage it is in your opener's manual, and the method varies by brand. On most, you pull the cord toward the door, or run the opener until the trolley clicks back onto the carriage. Do it only with the door fully closed. A released door that is partly open can come down on its own if the springs are not holding it.

3. Look up at the springs

If the power is fine and the trolley is connected, the springs are next. You can check them from the floor without touching anything.

Most homes have a torsion spring: a tightly wound coil on a metal shaft just above the top of the door. When one breaks, you will see a gap of about two inches somewhere along the coil, where it snapped and unwound. Some doors have extension springs instead, running alongside the horizontal tracks on each side. A broken one is stretched out of shape, snapped in two, or hanging loose.

The classic sign is a loud bang from the garage earlier, often when nobody was using the door. A spring under full tension lets go with a sound people mistake for a gunshot or something falling off a shelf.

Two other symptoms point the same way. The door opens a few inches and then stops, because the opener feels the weight and gives up. Or the door feels like dead weight. If that matches what you see, our broken spring repair page explains what the job involves. Read the box below first.

What not to do with a broken spring

4. Check the cables

Each side of the door has a steel lift cable. On a torsion system it runs from the bottom bracket up to a drum on the spring shaft; on an extension system it runs through pulleys. The cables do the actual lifting. If one is slack, snapped or has come off its drum, the door either lifts crooked, one side higher than the other, or will not lift at all.

Look at both sides. A cable hanging loose, unwound from its drum or frayed at the bottom is a job for a technician, and our cable repair page explains why. Don't touch the bottom bracket: it is under tension.

If the door is visibly crooked in its opening, or a roller has come out of the track, stop there. Running the opener against a door in that state bends tracks and creases panels. Our page on an off-track garage door covers what to do next.

5. The opener itself

If the springs and cables look right and the trolley is engaged, the fault may be inside the opener head.

A motor that hums but nothing moves, with the trolley connected, usually means a stripped drive gear. On many chain and belt openers that gear is plastic, and it wears through with years of use, faster if it has spent time hauling a door with a weak or broken spring. A click with no lift can mean a failed start capacitor or a fault on the logic board.

Whether an opener is worth repairing depends on its age and which part has gone. Our opener repair page walks through repair versus replace.

Car stuck inside? What to do right now

If you need the car out and the door will not open, this is the safe order:

1. Make sure the door is fully closed.
2. Look at the springs as described in step 3. If you can see a gap in a torsion spring or a snapped extension spring, stop and call.
3. If the springs look intact, pull the emergency release cord.
4. Lift the door by hand from the bottom, using a handle rather than the panel joints. A healthy door should feel light.
5. If it feels heavy, put it back down gently and call. That is a spring problem even if you could not see it. Never prop a heavy door open with a ladder, a board or anything else.

A car trapped behind a broken spring is exactly what our emergency garage door repair service is for, and we answer 24/7.

What the door is telling you, in one table