For a while, a friend of mine would
come home from work to find her garage door wide open, or hear it opening in
the dead of night. In bed, the sound of a garage door opener operating is one
of the creepiest sounds- was someone invading her home? But as it turned out,
it wasn’t a burglar- it was a malfunction.
Being the savvy woman that she is, my
friend checked the frequencies of her neighbor’s remotes to make sure they
weren’t inadvertently controlling her garage door. At first she staked out their houses to watch when they
opened their doors to see if hers opened as well. It did not. She also tried
switching the DIP switched on her remote to see if that would solve the problem.
It didn’t.
She then wanted to make sure it wasn’t
the safety sensors going haywire, so she temporarily disconnected them to see
if the problem would persist. (She doesn’t have any small children or pets
anymore, os the risk of accidental injury was pretty negligible.) The problem
continued even when the sensors were off.
They were not the culprits. In the end,
it was a wall button that had shorted a circuit and was misfiring all the time-
replacing the button solved the problem.