If you’ve been having major problems with your garage door opener remote – even if it’s intermittent problems where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t – and can’t figure out what it is – you should investigate as to what types of lighting you use near or inside your garage to find the cause. In this detailed blog post, the experts at Garage Door Repair Chicago will provide you the knowledge to truly understand how LED lights can interfere with garage door openers.
Sensitive Control Circuits
The cause of the of problem could be the control circuit that provides the longevity of the LED lights. LEDs, or light emitting diodes, receive their efficient power from a property deemed PWM, or pulse width modulation, which turns the light on and off over fifteen times during every second. This leads to major energy savings due to the fact that technically the light is only on half the time it appears to be – and you don’t realize this, because of a visuo-psychological phenomenon called persistence of vision.
The government requires that LED manufacturers set the control circuits of the diodes to work on a frequency somewhere between thirty and three-hundred MHZ. By sheer chance, the majority of the garage door opener remotes operate on a frequency between two-hundred-eighty-eight and three-hundred-sixty MHZ. This can cause garage door openers to become suddenly dysfunctional – especially in the vicinity of LED lights (we see these issues often around Christmas, when there’s large LED light displays. Each time the Christmas lights are activated, the garage door openers go on the fritz.)
Fluorescent Lighting
These issues are also reported often when garage owners switch from using normal incandescent light bulbs to fluorescent lights (named CFL’s, compact fluorescent lights) inside their garages. These incidents have been seen so commonly that garage door dealers are now asking their customers to not use LED or CFL lighting inside their garages, despite how much money they help people save on energy bills.
Sometimes even well made products cause issues due to device signal crossover/leakage. This is the exact reasons that airplanes maintain a strict policy of ensuring that cell phones are turned off before take off- because the signals can interfere with the air traffic control signals. This is also the reason gas stations sometimes require that you don’t operate your phone while you’re pumping gas.
People at shopping malls reported issues with unlocking cars with their remote key transponders. By using a handheld receiver, mall officials were able to trace the issue to a nearby restaurant that used a wireless order placing system. You can find the solution to these issues by changing the lighting type or light bulb brand that you’re using in your home. It might be best to first start by using a different brand of light bulbs, as this would be the cheapest option. Usually the cheaper, foreign made lightbulbs cause this, so try using an American made brand name light bulb. If this doesn’t solve your issue, your garage sensors might be sensitive, and you may have to switch to a slightly less environmentally efficient incandescent lighting system.
