So a few weeks back, the garage door opened in the afternoon. Nothing out of the usual–I assumed my wife got home from work early. My wife was not home. I checked my Nest camera and she never came back, yet sure enough, the garage door opened. It proceeded to close and open a few more times. Clearly, shenanigans were afoot.
First thing I thought, there must be bad wire connections between my wall unit and the garage door opener. I did not instantly think that the wireless remote control signal was compromised. The way the garage door was opening and closing on its owned seemed too suspicious to me. It wouldn’t just open and just close, it would attempt to close and open while the garage door was moving. The strangest part was when it was getting the same signal multiple times in a row. For example, if it was physically opening, it would sometimes get multiple subsequent open signals. I don’t see how I could manually make that happen–very bizarre.
So after I secured any electrical tape wire transitions with wire nuts, I connected power back to the garage door opener and crossed my fingers. Within 24 hours the garage door opened on its own again. Fortunately it opened in the morning after I woke up and not in the middle of the night!
So the issue apparently was not a loose wire connection. Time to get more serious with the troubleshooting. This was the part where I actually began to question funny business with a third party remote. I walked around towards my neighbors hitting my remote to see if perhaps the signal was synchronized between my unit and a neighbors somehow. This did not appear to be the case, but in the interest of caution/security I still reset all of my wireless remotes. After doing this, the garage door was still opening and closing on its own. Wow–guess that rules out the wireless signal. So now I’m looking at the logic board on the garage door opener itself and I’m looking at the wall control in the garage.
I proceed to disconnect the wall control and leave its two leads dangling free overnight. Fortunately the wireless remotes still function so I can still use my garage door opener, it is just inconvenient opening and closing the garage door from inside the garage. The garage door seemed to stabilize after removing the wall unit, pointing to the wall controller as the problem instead of the logic controller (aka logic board or printed circuit board) on the garage door unit.
Narrowing things down to the wall controller, I get started researching and find that there exists a common issue that has to do with failing capacitors on a similar unit. With optimism I order replacement capacitors and acquire a soldering iron to replace a capacitor that appears to be in bad shape. I get the capacitor replaced on there and things are great for exactly a week until the same problem occurs. At this point I frankly get annoyed and research replacement wall controllers.
The wall unit in question is a 41A7327-1 Chamberlain unit. This unit appears very similar to the LiftMaster 888LM with a known capacitor failure problem resulting in erratic garage door activity. This means that I don’t even want to replace the unit with an identical unit–this could be an engineering flaw. After brief research I found the 882LM is a more dumbed down version of the same 888LM. I found pictures of the 882LM logic board (PCB) and it lacks the large capacitors that fail on the 888LM so I am going to give it a chance. It cost almost half the price as well so I am hopeful this works out.
Stay tuned to see if I continue this garage door struggle. Worst case scenario I will need to replace the Chamberlain 050DCTWF setup with something else which would be sad, because I like the associated app’s functionality.