I have a German-made garage door operator. The base unit and the controllers are four years old (installed new when the house was built).
Starting about a year ago, my controller started being intermittently persnickety. Occasionally, when the button was pushed, the red confirmation light wouldn’t illuminate, and the door wouldn’t open. This slowly increased in frequency until now, when you have to click the button twenty or thirty times to get a reaction.
It is not the battery. I have changed the battery twice with no effect.
The controller looks like this:
The little rectangle at top is the indicator light that blinks when a button is pushed. The top button triggers the garage door to open and close. The other buttons have other functions, like activating the safety light on the base unit. This is how I know the problem is not the battery — the other buttons work just fine. It’s only the top button that seems to be wearing out in some way.
Now, here is the weird behavior that is the subject of the thread.
I discovered a couple of weeks ago that if you put the side of the controller to your mouth and blow very gently for a few seconds, the top button works immediately and without fail. I’m not talking about a hard puff, like to clear dust. It requires a soft, sustained push of air, like when you’re cupping your hands around your mouth and blowing gently to warm them in the winter. The side of the controller (the silver band in the picture above) has a seam, so when you do this, you can feel you are blowing into the unit’s interior.
This leads me to believe that it’s the moisture that is key — somehow, introducing warm water vapor inside the unit improves some connection somewhere, and allows the button to function.
I know this question necessarily invites speculation, but hopefully there’s some rational explanation for this otherwise very strange behavior.