The Day America Locked Canada Out of Its Garages

If you live in a house with a garage, there’s a good chance you have an automatic garage door opener. You press a button on a little remote, and the door goes up; press it again, and it comes back down. It’s one of those small conveniences that you don’t think about until it stops working. And in early November 2005, thousands of people in and around Ottawa, Canada, suddenly had a lot of time to think about it.

Their garage doors stopped working. All at once.

The phenomenon began suddenly over a weekend, and at first, no one knew what was going on. J.P. Cleroux, the owner of a garage door company, told CBC News that a powerful signal was blocking garage door openers across a massive area. “It affects a 25-mile radius. That’s huge,” he said. Another local company received more than 100 calls from frustrated customers who couldn’t operate their doors. The problem wasn’t mechanical — the doors themselves were fine. The remotes just wouldn’t work, no matter how close you stood or how many times you pressed the button.

The culprit? An American invasion. Well, over the airways.

The United State military had bee testing a new walkie-talkie-like technology called a “land mobile radio system.” It allowed for people to share messages over part of the radio spectrum. Unfortunately, there was a nasty little coincidence: garage door openers across North America typically operated on the 390-megahertz frequency band, and so did the military’s new radios. When both systems tried to use the same slice of the radio spectrum, it wasn’t exactly a fair fight. The garage door remotes transmitted on very low power; the military radios used a ton. As one technician put it, it was like a whisper competing with a yell.

The problem wasn’t limited to Ottawa. As NBC News reported, manufacturers had received over 1,300 customer complaints of affected garage door openers since August 2005, and one major manufacturer estimated that its distributors had received between 7,000 and 10,000 complaints — mostly from people living near U.S. military bases. The Government Accountability Office eventually recommended that the Department of Defense warn nearby communities about potential interference, but because the military was the authorized user of that frequency band, it was under no legal obligation to fix the problem. Further, the longstanding use of the 390-megahertz band by garage door openers was unauthorized (but, given the short radius, overlooked), the garage door openers were, technically speaking, the interlopers.

The solution, for those who wanted one, wasn’t cheap. Some manufacturers offered retrofit kits that would shift garage door openers to a different frequency, but those cost between $50 and $100, not including installation. For everyone else, the only real option was to wait — and maybe park in the driveway for a while. (Today, garage door openers operate in the 315-megahertz range, to avoid the military’s incursion.)

Bonus fact: If your garage door opens seemingly randomly in the middle of the night, you may want to call a wildlife control, not the garage door technician. In 2020, Bill Dowd, one such expert, shared a story of a very smart raccoon with the Montreal Gazette:

“We’ve had raccoons that were intelligent enough that once when a homeowner left the garage door open, a raccoon climbed up and accidentally hit the button that closed the garage door.”

The raccoon hid in the rafters and figured out how to open the garage door.

“So basically, every time it went out at 2 a.m. it would hit the button and open the door by itself. The garage door would stay open all night. Then the raccoon would come back in the morning, hit the button again, and close the door.

From the Archives: How a Strange Car Accident Turned Out A-OK: They didn’t park in the garage, got into an accident while sleeping, and ending up cashing in.