Garage Door Opener Weak Signal / Interference from LEDs

Four months ago our Chainberlain LiftMaster Professional garage door remotes started acting flaky. The remotes would only work in very close proximity to the door, like right in front of the door. We would repeatedly attempt to close or open the garage door from the cars parked right in front of the driveway and would only have success maybe after 20 tries.  At first we thought it was a battery issue, but in my car the garage door opener runs off of the car power. I then cleared all remote codes and re-learned all the remotes. I also noticed that the LED learn indicator would blink as if it was receiving a signal, but when there was no signal being sent. I assumed that it was getting some kind of interference, but didn't know from what.


The issue continued to plague us for months. Maybe the antenna had come loose. Maybe the safety sensors were out of alignment. I finally found a discussion board (http://www.diyforums.net/i-have-a-liftmaster-garage-door-opener-unit.-the-remote-work...-7206324.html) that cited LED light bulbs as the culprit for other people's similar sounding issues. But, I didn't have any LED bulbs (or so I thought). I was using a CFL bulb in the garage door opener. Maybe that was causing some interference as it was getting old. I removed it but still no success with the remotes. What else had changed? Then I remembered that I had moved one of the HooToo IP cameras to the garage a few months ago. It has a ring of IR LED lights around the camera lens. The lights automatically activate when there is low light.


As soon as I unplugged the camera, the remotes started working fine again. The camera is now back in another room, because apparently as long as LEDs aren't on the same power circuit, the opener will work fine. The LEDs apparently send an interference signal back up the power line which is enough to confuse the receiver board of the garage door opener. Any other circuit in the house is apparently far enough away to not be a problem. I suppose I could alternatively, disable the IR LEDs as I mentioned in a previous article (disabling-ir-on-hootoo-indoor-hp-ip210). So watch out for more interference issues as the use of LEDs becomes more widespread in household bulbs, holiday lights, and other devices like this camera. 

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Garage Door Service Twin Cities said...
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