A lost remote is a security problem first
When a garage remote goes missing, the instinct is to replace it. The right first move is to wipe it. A remote that has fallen out of a pocket at the shops, been left in a car that was sold, or gone with a tenant who moved out is still paired to your receiver, and whoever has it can open your garage — and through most garages, your house — until it is removed from the receiver's memory. Buying a second remote does nothing about the first.
So the job, when a remote is lost, is to clear the receiver of every paired remote and re-pair the ones still in the household. That takes a few minutes at the motor, it costs nothing extra, and it is the part of the job that actually protects you. A new remote is then added. If you have not done this after a lost remote, a car sale or a change of tenant, it is worth doing regardless of whether anything has happened since.
Adding, replacing and pairing
Most Cape Town garages run on a short list of motor brands, and each has its own remote and its own pairing routine — a learn button on the motor, a sequence on the receiver, or a code set by dip switches on older units. The van carries remotes for the common brands and universal remotes that can be taught to most receivers, so a second remote for a new driver, a replacement for one that has stopped working, or a remote for a visitor's car is sorted at the door in a single visit.
The same visit covers the things that get asked for alongside a remote: a wall-mounted keypad by the garage so nobody needs a remote to get in, a phone app on motors that support one, a remote that also opens the driveway gate so a car carries one device rather than two, and a remote for the second car. All of it is programmed and tested before the technician leaves, and you are left with a note of how to add or remove a remote yourself for the next time.
The receiver that has stopped listening
The intermittent fault — the remote works from the driveway but not from the road, works in the morning but not at night, works for one car and not the other — is almost always the receiver, not the remote. Receivers lose range as their components age, they are interfered with by neighbouring devices on the same frequency, and on older motors the receiver board simply wears out. A remote with a fresh battery that only works when it is held up to the motor is a receiver problem.
Where the receiver is built into the motor's board and has failed, the fix is often a separate external receiver wired to the motor, which is cheaper than a new board and gives better range than the original ever did. Where the range problem is interference — common in complexes and townhouse blocks, where a dozen garages share a wall — the answer is sometimes a receiver on a different frequency. Both are a visit, not a new motor, and neither is a motor repair even though that is what gets called for.
Remotes on an older motor
Older motors — the ones fitted in the nineties and early two-thousands, still working on doors across the Southern Suburbs — used dip-switch remotes, where the code is set by a row of tiny switches inside the remote and matched to the receiver. They are simple, they still work, and the remotes for them are getting hard to find. Where a household has one working remote for a dip-switch motor and wants a second, a universal remote can usually be set to match; where they have none, an external receiver with modern rolling-code remotes is fitted to the old motor, which keeps the motor and solves the remote problem permanently.
Rolling-code is worth having. A fixed-code remote sends the same signal every time, and a device that records it can replay it. A rolling-code remote sends a different signal each press, and a recording is useless. Every remote and receiver fitted here is rolling-code, and moving an old fixed-code motor over to it is a small job that closes a real hole.
When it really is the motor
Some remote calls turn out to be motor calls. A remote that does nothing, on a motor whose wall button also does nothing, is a dead motor, not a dead remote. A remote that opens the door but the door then reverses is the safety system tripping, which is a spring or beam matter. The technician checks the wall button and the motor's own light before touching the remote, because a new remote for a dead motor is money spent on the wrong thing.
Where a new motor is going in anyway — on a discontinued brand with no receiver parts, or a motor that has failed on its own — the remotes come as part of the automation, programmed on the day, and the old ones are wiped as a matter of course.