#1 Your Photo Eye is BlockedMost garage doors from the past 15-20 years will have a photo eye which detects if a person or object is blocking the door from lowering all the way. The photo eye will be about 4-6 inches off of the ground for most doors, with an eye that is about the size of a pea. The photo eye shoots a laser across the length of the garage that if interrupted will cut off the signal used to lower and raise the door. Check both that the cord attached to the eye is not cut or damaged, occasionally a rainstorm or leak can affect the photo eye and damage it. Sometimes dirt and dust can clog the eye and block it from shooting its lazer beam, so a thorough cleaning with a tissue can sometimes dissolve this issue. Plug it in Plug it in #2 Your operator's power source is disrupted.Sometimes people will unplug their power source and then wonder why their garage door opener fails to work. Sounds ridiculous I know, but it does happen very often. Make sure that your garage door opener is plugged into a working outlet.
Outlets sometimes go out without warning, so you can check to see it the outlet is working by plugging another working electronic device into the outlet to see if the plug is working. Also check your circuit breaker, fuse or GFCI. DIY or Professional Help Did you hire a pro garage door repair company or fix your garage yourself? Hired a PRO I'm a DIY kind of personSee results #3 Your Garage Door Torsion Springs are BrokenSNAP... That is the sound of a garage door torsion spring breaking. It can be a very loud noise that sometimes sounds like a firecracker or gunshot. Either way, if you have a broken spring on your garage door you should NEVER try to open the door, it can be very dangerous to open the door and should be left to a professional or someone with the right tools and skills of garage door repair. Springs are rated for a certain number of cycles and the first thing that will break in your garage door assembly. Broken springs are the #1 source of customer calls for garage door repair companies.
Broken Garage Doors are a Pain! You can fix some simple issues DIY style. Broken Garage Door Torsion Springs How to program your garage door remote #6 Your Remote Control is MalfunctioningWhen your garage door won't open with the remote there are few things that can cause this problem. You might be out of range of the door The antenna on the motor could be damaged or blocked from the signal, make sure it is hanging down from the motor. If the door opens with the wall switch, a simple battery change should do the trick If all these fail, try reprogramming the remote. #4 Your Garage Door Cables Have SnappedOftentimes when a torsion spring breaks on a garage door, the garage door cable will snap under the immense amount of energy that is released with the break. Sometimes the cable will cause damage to a vehicle or wall, and if a person happens to be in the way of the cable it can cause serious harm. If you cables have snapped you should call a professional to help you repair the damage and get your garage door back to working order.
#5 Your Sensitivity is out of AdjustmentThis can happen to a newly installed garage door or an older one, if the sensitivity is set too low or high the opener will not open due to the fact that it will not sense that the door has enough weight or too much. You can test your sensitivity on the opener with your manufacturers directions in the documentation. You can adjust the close force and limit switch to the right levels and you should be good to go! Make Sure Your Sensitivity is Correct!Enter the characters you see below Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies. Type the characters you see in this image:Edit ArticleHow to Align Garage Door Sensors Garage door sensors protect your family, possessions and pets by not allowing the heavy garage door to close if there is anything in the glide path. They do this by using an electric eye sensor that crosses the doorway. If the sensor doesn't receive the beam emitted by its opposite number, the door won't close.
This seems like a clever device until the components come out of alignment -- meaning the door won't close at all. Fortunately, it's not difficult to realign the sensors and put things back into working order. Turn off the power to your sensors by tripping the fuse for your garage. You'll find this in your home's breaker box. You won't actually be working with the electrical wiring, but it's always best to be safe when working with electricity. Loosen the screws that mount each of your garage door sensors. Slide each garage door sensor downward so it is as low as possible without unscrewing the mounting brackets. Tie a string to one sensor so that, if pulled across the garage doorway, it will run across the center of the sensor. Run the string across the garage doorway and tie to the opposite sensor. Lay a level so the bottom runs along the string. Check that the line of the string is level. If the line of the string isn't level, adjust 1 or both garage door sensors by sliding the mounting bracket upward.
Continue until the sensors are once again level. Tighten the screws to secure the garage door sensors in their new position. Confirm that the string is level before finishing. Finish by removing the string and turning the power to your garage back on. Show more unanswered questions If you have a laser level, you can use it instead of a string to align your garage door. In this case, you will set up the level aligned with one sensor, then adjust the opposite sensor until the beam of your laser level is hitting the sensor. Proper height for a garage door sensor is 4 to 6 inches (10.2 to 15.2 cm). Higher than that can miss many low-lying objects, including pets. Lower is easy to stand above with a foot on either side. If your garage door sensors are outside of this range, remove them entirely from the garage door frame and install, leveled, inside the safe zone.How To Reattach Your Automatic Garage Door OpenerWe’re lucky where I live. And my “where I live” I mean my specific neighborhood and my specific house.
Knock on wood, we don’t have the issues with flooding that so many around me (including in my neighborhood) do. We don’t lose power. We don’t have major natural disasters. So of course we lost power for the first time since we moved into our house.If you haven’t noticed, it’s been incredibly hot this summer. And on one of our hottest days of the year, we lost power. At first, it was a flicker that went out for just a minute or so before everything turned back on. Five minutes later, the power went out, but there was no buzz of the house turning itself back on. As time ticked by, it got awfully warm in our house. Calling ComEd – our electric company in Chicago – I found out that it would be hours before they expected to repair the blown transformer and restore power.It was a no brainer. I called our library, confirmed they had power (and air conditioning), and I packed up the wee ones. Getting out of the garage wasn’t a huge issue. I know how to disable the automatic garage door opener.
In my case, you simply pull on the red lever, which removes the motor and gear from the track. Then I can manually lift it up and exit the garage – just like I did when I was a little kid and we didn’t have an automatic garage door opener.Unlike when I was a little kid, we don’t have a key to lock our garage door to keep anyone from coming in the way we did back then. Instead, I locked the back door to our house (thank goodness for the battery operated keypad lock on our front door), and manually closed the garage door. What else can I do, right?Yes, it was definitely a good call to leave my house. The power outage was fairly widespread. When there’s no power to stoplights anywhere around, you know it’s a bad sign. It took us awhile to get to the library, but we were happy to be there (and meet up with some friends who had the same idea) once we finally arrived.After a few hours at the library, I got a text from a friend letting me know power had been restored. We all cheered and jumped back in the car to return home.
When we arrived, I manually opened the garage door again and drove inside. After scooting the wee ones through the front door, I turned my attention to the garage door, knowing I wanted to reconnect it so that it would work with my opener again.It’s only easy if you remember how to do it. I pressed the garage door opener, pleased with myself for remembering how to do this, since I hadn’t had to reconnect my garage door opener in over 10 years. I waited for it to engage the gears as it went past, smiling to myself. The motor worked and pulled the gear along, but the garage door wasn’t engaged and remained firmly planted on the garage floor.I tried pulling and tugging the cord to see if that worked. Calling friends to see if they (or their husbands if they were around) knew how to reattach the garage door opener. I could have sat down to cry. Or I could have pretended that all was well with the world and that I wanted to manually open and close the garage door for the rest of the time I lived in this house.