The Magnet 084: Mystery of the Motorized Garage Door
An Unplugged Enigma
I’m a fan of the podcast Otherworld, where people share personal experiences that they can’t explain. I think everyone has at least one inexplicable story in their lives, a moment or event that defies logical explanation.
Here’s one of mine:
In 2010, we bought a small house in Los Angeles and rented it to a lovely woman (I’ll call her J) and her son. It had an attached garage for parking and storage, which was also where the washer and dryer were. The only way to get into the garage was through the garage door. It had a side door leading to the backyard, but no one used it because it was inconvenient, the knob was missing, and the lock was broken. To keep strangers from coming in, I put a padlock on the door from the outside and nailed the door shut from the inside. J stacked a plastic storage bin and a wicker basket against the inside of the door.
The garage door didn’t have a motor, so J had to open and close it by hand. In April 2021, I finally installed a motorized opener and gave J two wireless controllers, also attaching a keypad next to the garage door.
Everything was fine for about a month, and J appreciated being able to park her car in the garage without getting out of the car and lifting the door.
On May 28, J, texted me and said “Hi Mark, I’m late for a doctor’s appointment, I cannot get the garage door open. It will not open. Is there a way to open it manually? I have both the remote and the code, neither are working.”
There was no way to open the garage door manually from the outside (which was obviously an oversight by the installer).
I replied, “I’ll come over and break the side door,” having long ago lost the key. As I walked to my car (she lived three minutes away), I asked her to check the circuit breaker to see if the power was off to the garage.
J checked the circuit panel and replied, “Nothing in the circuit breaker looks tripped.”
I arrived at the house with my toolbox, a crowbar, and a rotary cutting tool. After unsuccessfully trying to lift the garage door by hand, I went into the backyard, cut and pried off the latch the padlock was attached to, and pushed the door until the nails came free. Inside, I pressed the button next to the door that opened and shut the garage door, but nothing happened. I then discovered the motor’s power cord plug was out of the socket. Once I plugged it in, the wireless controller worked again and the door opened.
J got in her car and drove to the doctor. I stuck around and tried to figure out what had happened. The simplest answer is that the plug fell out of the socket, but it took effort to unplug it. Someone or something pulled it out. But how? With the side door locked, nailed, and blocked with boxes, no one could have entered that way. There are no windows, either. There were no signs of animal bites on the cord.
Someone could have opened the garage door with a remote, closed it, then pulled the plug from the inside. But the only way to exit would be to pull the garage door opener’s emergency release cord and lift the door manually to get out. However, they wouldn’t have been able to reset the emergency release latch from the driveway. (Here’s a video that shows how to release and reset a garage door latch.) And, as I said above, I couldn't lift the garage door when I tried. It was locked.
An equally perplexing question is why? Why would someone unplug it?
It was so weird and mystifying that I took photos: