The button does nothing. Or the motor strains and quits. Or the door rises four inches, thinks about it, and gives up. A door that won’t open has a short list of causes — and two of them take under a minute to rule out before you ever pick up the phone.
Check one: is it locked?
Most doors have a manual slide lock on the inside, and plenty of openers have a lock mode on the wall button. A door that’s mechanically locked will strain against the opener exactly like a broken door. Check the slide bar, then hold the lock button on the wall console for a few seconds and try again. It’s embarrassing how often this is the whole repair.
Check two: is the opener actually connected?
The red emergency release cord — the one dangling from the trolley — disconnects the door from the opener when pulled. If someone bumped it, the motor runs and the door stays home. Look up: if the trolley has been pulled away from its drive point, pull the cord toward the door to re-engage, then run the opener. You’ll hear it click back together.
Check three: look at the spring
Stand back and look at the coil above the door (or the springs along the upper tracks). A gap of two or three inches in the coil means a snapped torsion spring — the door has lost the counterbalance that does the actual lifting, and the opener was never meant to dead-lift the full weight. Do not keep trying the button: you’ll strip the drive gear and turn a spring job into a spring-plus-opener job.
Check four: pull the release and lift by hand
With the opener disengaged, lift the door from the center — evenly, with help if it’s a double. A healthy door lifts smoothly and holds at waist height. A door that’s refrigerator-heavy has a spring problem. A door that binds or grinds partway has a track or roller problem. Either way, you now know something real — and so do we when you describe it.
Where to stop
Anything involving spring tension, cable replacement, or track realignment is where DIY ends — the stored energy in that system is genuinely dangerous. If your checks point there, that’s the call. Same-day slots exist for exactly this, and the fix is usually under an hour once a stocked truck is in the driveway. The full repair picture is on the repair service page.
