What is a Garage Door Vacation Lock?
The vacation lock on your garage door opener adds peace of mind for anyone who is away from their home for an extended amount of time.
The vacation lock is a button or switch found on the wall button of your automatic garage door opener. Depending on the type of wall button you have, it can be a push button, slide switch, or a feature inside the menu of a digital screen. Let's take a look at what function the vacation lock serves.
What Does the Vacation Lock Do?
The vacation lock feature on your automatic garage door opener locks out the remotes, so your garage door can’t be opened from outside. Genie and LiftMaster outside keypads will continue to work. Linear outside keypads do not work if the vacation lock is activated.
Where Do I Find the Vacation Lock?
The vacation lock switch or button can be found in different places depending on the type of wall button you have. Most Genie wall buttons will use a slide switch that must be moved slid over to engage the vacation lock. The Linear brand uses this same type of switch for their vacation lock.
While the Linear vacation lock will show red on the slide switch when activated, most Genie wall button will turn off the red light that shines when the vacation lock is engaged. This is how you know something has been disabled on the unit.
LiftMaster and Chamberlain wall buttons will normally feature a button that must be held down for five seconds to engage the vacation lock. When this happens, the green or orange light that shines on the wall button will be flashing to signal the vacation lock has been activated.
LiftMaster wall consoles with digital screens like show above will have the lock feature in the menu system. If you navigate through the menu, you should see a feature to enable the lock.
The top button on the Marantec wall button shown above is the vacation lock button. To activate, you must hold down the button for three seconds. Once you do this, the backlight on the wall button will flash, signaling that the vacation lock has been activated.
Should I Use the Vacation Lock?
The vacation lock is a good feature to use if you go out of town, especially if the buttons in your vehicles are programmed to open your garage door. If one of your vehicles was broken into, this would prevent anyone from gaining access to your garage.
Keep in mind, only the Linear brand locks out the outside keypad. If you have family or friends that have your keypad code, they will still be able to gain access into the garage.
Are There Other Ways to Secure My Garage Door?
Yes. We wrote an extensive article on the many ways to secure a garage door. If you need more security than the vacation lock offers, take a look at the article below.
