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Unreliable garage-door opener when using LED light bulbs?

My car’s Homelink transmitter was frustratingly inconsistent: it would usually open the garage door, but would often fail to close it.

I came across this article on this exact problem and thought it was probably a bot-generated content farm, but this was worth investigating:

Government guidelines for LED manufacturers require these control circuits to operate on frequencies between 30 and 300 MHz. By coincidence, most garage door opener remotes have been assigned frequencies between 288 and 360 MHz.

I was using a mediocre, no-name LED light bulb in my (very old) garage-door opener, so I switched it to an incandescent I had stashed in my Drawer Of Light, which promptly and poetically burned out later that same day.1

But that was weeks ago, and the problem hasn’t occurred since. It’s been 100% reliable since I removed the LED bulb, and even catches the signal from greater distance now.

  1. I still haven’t gotten around to replacing it. It turned out not to be essential, and I’m a terrible home-repair slacker, which is why I tried to put LED bulbs everywhere in the first place so half of our light bulbs wouldn’t be burned out constantly. ↩︎

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