Garage Door Opener Clicks But Won't Open?

This is the headline cause and the reason most people land on this page. The capacitor gives the motor its initial shove, and when it dies the motor is left with power, no rotation, and nowhere to put the energy except heat. Capacitors fail for two reasons out here: age, and temperature. They're the most heat-sensitive component in the whole unit, and they spend their lives near a garage ceiling that passes 130°F in July. A capacitor that would have lasted fifteen years in a mild climate doesn't always manage ten here.

How you can tell: A low hum for a second or two with no rotation, repeatable every time you press the button. The truly diagnostic version: if a careful nudge on the chain or belt while it's humming gets the motor turning, the capacitor is weak and you've confirmed it. On some units you can see the capacitor bulging at one end, or leaking a waxy residue.

Less common than a capacitor, and considerably worse news. Motor bearings dry out, run rough, and eventually bind. Gearboxes pack with the residue of a disintegrated nylon gear, or a worm gear picks up on a dry shaft. In either case the rotor physically can't turn, so a healthy capacitor and a healthy winding still produce nothing but a hum. Fine dust makes this worse here than it should be — silt works past seals and into bearings that were only ever meant to see clean air.

How you can tell: It hums the same way a capacitor failure does, but nudging the chain achieves nothing, and the opener gets hot noticeably faster. With the unit unplugged you can often turn the drive by hand at the manual sprocket and feel the roughness or the hard stop.

You hear the click, so the board did its part. But relay contacts pit and burn over thousands of cycles, and a contact that has welded, oxidised, or lost its spring can close audibly and still pass almost no current. The same silent result comes from a motor lead that has vibrated off its terminal, a crimped connector that has corroded, or a winding that has gone open circuit internally. All of them produce a click and then absolutely nothing.

How you can tell: One clean click, no hum at all, no vibration if you rest a hand on the motor housing, and the opener light behaves normally. Nothing gets warm, because nothing is drawing current.

Starting torque is the hardest thing an opener does, and a motor that has enough to run a balanced door doesn't necessarily have enough to break loose a door the springs have stopped carrying. When a torsion spring breaks, the full weight of the door — 150 to 250 pounds on a typical residential unit — lands on the opener at the exact moment it has the least torque available. The motor energises, can't move it, and sits there humming until the thermal cutout intervenes.

How you can tell: There's usually a before-and-after. A loud bang, often heard from inside the house and mistaken for something falling in the garage, then a door that won't open. Look at the shaft above the door: a broken torsion spring shows a clear gap, and the two halves usually sit an inch or two apart. If the door is up and something is holding it, don't go under it.

Motors need substantially more current to start than to run, and if the supply can't deliver that surge, the voltage at the motor collapses and it never gets going. The usual culprits are an extension cord, a long or undersized circuit run out to a detached garage, an outlet shared with something heavy like a freezer or a compressor, or a worn receptacle whose contacts no longer grip the plug properly. The symptom is often intermittent, and it can be worse in the afternoon when everything in the neighborhood is pulling on the grid at once.

How you can tell: It works sometimes and clicks other times, with no mechanical pattern. The opener light may dim visibly at the moment you press the button. Frequently better first thing in the morning than late on a hot afternoon.

Worth ruling out early because it's the cheapest possible answer. Some openers give a single click from the head or the wall console when they receive a command and then decline to act on it — lock mode engaged, a wall control whose contacts are stuck, or a sensor circuit the board is unhappy about. The click is acknowledgement, not effort. It's easy to mistake for a motor problem, and it costs nothing to eliminate.

How you can tell: The click sounds thin and comes from the wall panel or the top of the head rather than deep inside the motor. Nothing vibrates. On a LiftMaster or Chamberlain the opener light usually blinks a code at the same moment, and that code names the fault outright.

Included because people describe these two faults with the same words and they aren't the same fault. If the motor spins up and runs its full cycle while the door sits there, nothing is wrong with the motor, the capacitor, or the board. The connection between the opener and the door has been broken: the trolley has been released and never re-engaged, the nylon drive gear has stripped its teeth, or the chain has jumped its sprocket.

How you can tell: You hear the motor run through what sounds like a complete normal cycle, possibly with a grinding note, and the door doesn't move at all. On a stripped gear you'll often find nylon shavings on the floor under the powerhead.