I hesitate to even post this, but twice now this happened. I come home and my garage door does not respond to the remote transmitter. OK, I get out of the pickup and attempt to use the wireless keypad that is attached to the outside of the garage. Again, there is no response. I enter the house with my keys and use the wired button to open the garage door. The garage door works fine with the wired button. Now comes the weird part. Both times my network has been down with no internet service. After awhile the network comes back up and the garage door starts working via RF. Coincidence?

Sounds more like something in the area is killing all RF signals. When it stops, both wifi and garage door work again.

I failed to mention, it kills the wired network.

What kind of opener? One of the MyQ type?

It sounds like mother nature not being fair and there are two independent issues.

Does the garage door opener radio operate in the WiFi band?

When it happens again, immediately unplug the garage door opening while monitoring the internet. Hopefully it'll start working.

Then after that, unplug the internet to see if the door opener starts working.

Also, is it possible that the internet and door opener are on the same phase? If they are, see about putting the internet on the other phase. As the door opener might be harder to swap phases. Unless you swap the breaker around.

KOT

Brand and model never matter. All components work identically.

Have you been able to determine that the garage door opener brings down the network, or that the network goes down and takes the garage door opener with it? Which is the cause?

It's a Genie from 1996, don't know the model.

But is it one of those networked models? ;)


According to google they somewhere around 400 MHz. Interesting that the RF for both are being knocked out. The range between the two are so wide, it makes King's theory seem the most logical.

given this is a new issue and not seen going on for years, the garage door opener may be nearing the end of its life.

Not networked.


That's a good suggestion.

I will try all of the above.

Even if there is a rogue RF device, either the garage door receiver and/or transmitter and/or a 3rd party polluting the RF spectrum, I don't think that this will bring down the wired network.

With regard to the network going down, I recently had a very bad experience with an Arris Comcast gateway. This was a purchased unit that would heckle us from time to time over the months. We could never get a clear symptom from the customer, other than "no Internet". But last week the situation went down hill dramatically. After a Comcast house call, instigated by the customer, and being bounced back and forth between Comcast and Arris support for hours, we finally just replaced the gateway and the Gateway and the problems vanished. (I won't declare victory yet because we are barely 48 hours into "success") As we worked with the Gateway it would reboot spontaneously at an ever increasing frequency. Comcast blamed the problem on a little box in the basement that had "green blinking lights". This turned out to be a cheap switch used as a PoE injector. (not installed by us) Arris claimed 'Low Return Signal", as reported by the Arris diagnostics, which would cause the Arris to reboot (by design). After several hours we broke the pointless support circle with the new unit.

I bring up this saga only to suggest that there could be a second issue causing the the network crash, with unfortunate timing, unrelated to the garage door opener.

I wonder if, when the network goes down the WIFI starts going nuts transmitting packets (do you have a WIFI AP or bridge also). Maybe, the WIFI has an intermediate frequency (spurious) around the frequency of the garage door opener and that screws it up (the receiver). The only way to really tell would be to have a RF spectrum analyzer and see what's going on when the garage door opener is not working. Garage door trans/rec aren't exactly the most well built RF devices every built, lol, especially ones from 1996!

Do you have any funny neighbors that would be awesome enough to buy some kind of RF signal jammer and sit waiting for you to drive up just for a laugh? Because that would be funny right there.

You're saying the WiFi could be spitting out something around 300 - 400 MHz?