Do LED Bulbs Interfere with Garage Door Openers?

If you use a garage door opener and it's suddenly stopped working with its remote opener after working fine for years, you might need to take a look at your light bulbs. At least if you changed them right before the garage door opener stopped working.

That's because a door opener works with its remote control on radio frequencies, just like remote controlled cars and even household wireless phones. And like any electronic device, a light bulb can produce electromagnetic fields with the potential for interfering with those wireless devices.

This is especially a concern with the rising adoption of LED light bulbs, whose drivers (a part inside the bulb) actively produce a field in a range that can interfere with garage doors. Some bulbs have been known to prevent garage doors from opening, or even to open them on their own!

Rest assured, you can still use LED bulbs for your garage lights, even within the garage door opener. You just need to buy light bulbs that don't cause this problem. How do you do this?

Well the fact is, a little shielding inside the LED can keep most of the Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) from escaping and can allow your garage door to work just fine. Unfortunately, with consumers demanding the lowest price possible on LEDs, plenty of companies have tried to meet that demand by foregoing quality issues like this shielding. We've spoken before about the risks of buying LED bulbs from unknown brands that don't have US reputations to uphold and may not be around to back up their warranties. We can add this to the list of risks.

While we can't guarantee that a name brand LED bulb will work with your garage door, we expect it to give you excellent odds. Especially because name brand LEDs should be marked with the FCC logo showing FCC compliance -- this includes minimizing RFI that would keep a garage door from working. If you see that logo, it's likely that the bulb will work without issue.

Of course if your garage door opener has stopped working with its remote, make sure to check the batteries in the remote before you take additional steps like buying new light bulbs. But if new LED bulbs seem to have caused the problem, look for a brand you can trust and an FCC label and you should be in good hands. Since we only carry LEDs whose brands we trust, you may want to look at our selection here. And while they last, you may want to consider this package of non-dimming A19 LEDs here for a great price per bulb.

Will those low-cost bulbs solve this problem? They should. The back of the package begins with the following:

"This device complies with Part 15 of the FCC rules. Operation is subject to the following two conditions: 1.) This device may not cause harmful interference, and 2.) This device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation."

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