Garage door recalls: the full record

What did we find?

Eight recalls. Four of them are garage doors or openers. We searched the CPSC SaferProducts recall API three ways by product name and removed duplicates by recall number. The results run from 1991 to 2023.

The four that are not doors are two garage heaters and two overhead storage racks. We publish them instead of quietly dropping them, because that result is a finding too.

The largest recall is a failure of the safety system federal law created. Chamberlain’s LiftMaster myQ control panels, February 2023, covered about 96,400 U.S. units. That is more than every other recall here combined.

CPSC states the hazard as: “The control panel’s secondary entrapment protection system can fail causing the garage door to close even with an obstruction present, posing an entrapment hazard.” Secondary entrapment protection (a second, independent way to detect something under the door) has been federally required since January 1, 1993.

Most incidents come from storage racks, not doors. The eight records carry 77 reported incidents. 73 of them are overhead storage racks falling from garage ceilings. Across 112,400 recalled door and opener units, CPSC records four incidents and no injuries.

What do eight recalls in 35 years tell you?

They tell you factory defects in garage doors have been rare, but not that installed doors are safe. The record is very short. Garage doors sit on tens of millions of American homes, under a federal safety standard since 1993. Yet the database returns eight results, and half are not doors.

HyreGarage analysis: there are two fair readings, and they do not conflict. First, the entrapment protection rule has worked well on products leaving the factory. It is old, specific and has been amended four times. If openers were shipping with faulty safety systems at scale, the recall record would show it. It does not.

Second, a recall can only see certain problems. It covers a defect present at manufacture, found after sale and serious enough for a national fix. It cannot see an opener installed wrongly, a sensor knocked out of line years later, a spring fitted to the wrong door, or a worn-out part nobody tracked.

Those are how garage doors fail in real use, and none of them is a recall matter. Our photo-eye sensor failures study looks at one of them.

The 1997 Chamberlain recall sits in between. It covered about 6,000 Sears Craftsman openers in Puerto Rico “that were not installed by a Sears authorized installer.” CPSC wrote that “[i]f installed improperly, the garage door openers’ safety reversal system may not operate properly.”

So the defect was not in the product. It was in how the product was installed. It is the only recall in this record that crosses that line.

Storage racks, not doors, are what has been falling on people

Two recalls in 2022, ten weeks apart, cover overhead garage storage racks. These are the steel platforms people bolt to the garage ceiling to get boxes off the floor. Together they cover about 30,300 units and 73 reports of racks falling.

SafeRacks/Monsterrax, April 2022, about 12,800 units: “The hex bolts in the overhead garage storage racks can be defective, causing the rack to collapse from the ceiling, posing an impact injury hazard.”

CPSC records 55 reports of those racks falling, “including one report of an injury where the corners of a ceiling mounted rack fell and bruised and cut a consumer’s face.”

Loctek FLEXIMOUNTS, June 2022, about 17,500 units: “One of the U-shaped buckles on the supporting cables can fail, posing an impact injury hazard to the user or bystander if the rack falls.” There were 18 reports of buckles failing and racks falling, and no injuries reported.

HyreGarage analysis: compare that with the door side of the record. Across 112,400 recalled door and opener units, the records give four incidents (Genie control boards overheating) and no injuries. Every reported injury in this whole list is a storage rack.

That does not prove racks are riskier than doors. They are different products, used by different people, failing in different ways, and reported differently. 73 reports against 4 says as much about reporting as about failure. A fallen rack is obvious and gets a complaint. An opener that fails to reverse may never get one.

What it does show is a gap between attention and evidence. People think hard about garage door safety and hardly at all about the shelf above the car. In the one federal dataset that records both, the shelf has the incidents and the injury.

If you have an overhead rack, checking its model against these two recalls takes five minutes. That is time better spent than most garage safety advice. In both cases the fix is free and does not expire.

What could we not find?

NEISS injury data. cpsc.gov returned HTTP 403 to every request from our environment on the retrieval date, so that data is missing. Every number here comes from a recall record. There is no injury estimate, rate or trend on this page, and the incident counts should not be read as one.

How many recalled products were actually fixed. It would show whether a recall worked, and it is not published. We cannot say how many of the 96,400 LiftMaster panels were replaced, or how many of the 30,300 racks were repaired. Firms generally need not publish these rates, and CPSC does not routinely.

The 1991 unit count. The Stanley record gives none, so it is left out of every total. Our unit figures are minimums, and we have not estimated the gap.

Whether the list is complete. We searched by product name using three terms. A recall whose product name used none of them would not appear. A category search on CategoryID 1965 would be more thorough. We publish the method so the limit is clear.

Canada. Two records give Canadian unit counts: 8,000 for the Genie recall and 19,300 for the Chamberlain one. Health Canada runs its own recall system, which we did not search. Our totals are U.S. units only.

One thing we chose not to do: rank manufacturers by recall count. There are four door recalls in 35 years, and two belong to the same firm through corporate history. Any ranking would be noise, and people would quote it as a safety comparison between brands. There is no basis for one.