I have a story to tell. The other day, I went out to my car to get something out of the trunk. I pressed the remote…nothing. I pressed other buttons on the remote key fob, and once the doors locked, and then the rest of the time it didn’t work, and then once the doors unlocked.
So I thought the battery on my 8 year old remote was dead. So I got my other car keys and tried that remote. Nothing! But this did not surprise me, as the batteries had been sitting in it unused for 8 years.
So I decided to go to the store to buy new batteries. I used the key to get into my car and backed out of the driveway. I pressed the garage door remote to close the garage door.
NOTHING!
Now this was quite odd! My car remote AND my GDO remote were dead.
I pulled back into the garage, and the door opener remote worked fine.
Something funny going on here, eh?
And then I knew what had happened…
Earlier in the evening, I had replaced my old wireless doorbell with a new one. I put the old doorbell, along with the front door button, into a plastic bag in which I had kept all the parts for the old one when I first bought it, including the button for the back door, which had come with the old doorbell. I had never used this button. I had, however, left the battery in it all this time. So when I put the old doorbell into the bag, it pressed against the back door button, but since I had removed the batteries from the doorbell itself, there was no sound.
Sure enough, as soon as I removed the old doorbell from the bag, all of my other remotes worked just fine! Needless to say, I made it a point to remove the battery from the back door button before re-bagging everything.
The funny part is, if I had gotten the garage door closed and gone off to the store, I would have been very perplexed upon discovering that, at the store, I could lock my car, AND open my trunk, with no problems!
BTW, the reason I knew what had happened so quickly is that…and this is quite strange…several years ago, though I can not remember the exact details, almost the same exact thing happened to me with other devices and remotes.