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I have 2 older Home Builder garage door openers. Both have hard wired buttons on the wall that work fine for opening and closing.

My remote in my vehicle and another hand held one work to open my door but will not close until I wait for about 3-4 minutes.

If I use my vehicle or hand held remote on my wife's side it will work fine. So it is only my side that will not work using my vehicle or hand held remote.

What could cause this?

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3 Answers 3

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When 3-4 minutes has passed since activation, the room light on the garage door opener turns off. This suggests that the light is creating RF interference. Remove the light bulb and see if your remote now works reliably. If so, you may have to do without the opener's room light, or use an incandescent bulb or find an LED or CFL that does not create RF interference.

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    There are even bulbs specifically branded as 'garage door bulb' which are designed to not interfere with openers. Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 21:20
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    @KMJ I believe bulbs specifically branded for garage doors are designed to handle the vibration of the openers rather than RF interference. Note that there are incandescent bulbs, which should cause no interference, labeled for garage doors. Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 23:04
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    @Barry Lack of RF interference is the specific claim made by bulbs such as geniecompany.com/led-light-bulb-/LED-Bulb Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 23:22
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    @KMJ wow, that's a ripoff. I guess some people are used to buying special garage bulbs, so why not sell them some? Most newer (>2020) LED bulbs won't cause interference, and in fact, ones that might are usually some of the better bulbs (otherwise). If you have a diode handy, you can test the bulb to see if it lights up when the diode is inline; if so, it won't cause interference (as it's a linear current regulator behind a capacitive dropper rather than a RF-interfering switch-mode power supply) providing DC to the LED chips. Commented Jan 26, 2023 at 0:49
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    @dandavis switch mode supplies will happily run off a DC supply, so your test doesn't really say much. Anyway I have found that all you need to avoid interference is to buy quality bulbs. Pretty sure they came up with these so they would have something to point people to that they know works. Commented Jan 26, 2023 at 7:12
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From what you write, I am taking the following conclusions:

Both openers work properly

This is proven by the hardwired button.

Both your remotes (your vehicle built-in remote and your handheld remote) work properly

This is proven by their ability to operate the opener on your wife's side

From that, we can assume the problem is with the RF interface of the opener on your side.

I would start by checking the antenna on your opener. Make sure it isn't kinked, broken, or tucked up inside the housing. Especially look for differences in the antennas on the openers.

I wouldn't bother troubleshooting the remotes themselves as they've been proven OK.

If the antennas are both undamaged and dangling downward, you can move to troubleshooting more finicky stuff like system board connections, etc. but first try the low-hanging fruit.

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I had the same issue with my garage door opener not working with the remote but only while the light was on. Removing the light bulb did not help. I diagnosed and found the large electrolytic capacitor on the circuit board went bad. I removed and replaced the capacitor and it works as good as new.

Details: With a bad capacitor the operating voltage becomes unstable. With the the light bulb solenoid engaged that seems to stress the power circuit even more to the point that the RF system stops working.

The original capacitor was 330uF 35V. I did not have that exact value but I had a bunch of 1500uF 16V capacitors so I put 2 in series to form the equivalent of 750uF 32V. In this case a higher uF is beneficial since its purpose is to smooth the DC voltage produced by the rectifier diodes. The slightly lower voltage rating is fine since the nominal operating voltage is 22V.

This is the final result after repair: https://photos.app.goo.gl/NyngpJCpYHafmWB39

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