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Your garage door has one job to do; open and close! Is it really that simple? Yes; it is. By working right, your Mableton, GA garage door keeps unwanted visitors out of your garage. These can be anyone from nosy neighbors to burglars, so it’s best to stop them all from accessing your garage and home without the right permissions. As useful and dependable as our garage doors are, we can expect glitches from time to time. After all, they are mechanically operated appliances with lots of moving parts. When put that way, it’s easy to see why occasionally door closure problems may occur.
You may be wondering, what is so bad about this? It may seem like mere inconvenience at first, but it is more than that. Let’s say you try and leave for work in the morning and you can’t close your garage door. Your choices are to stay home and watch over your property or go to work and leave your open garage vulnerable to any one driving or walking by. Neither option sounds good so why choose either?
Here’s another possible scenario. You do actually leave for work and as you back up out of the driveway, you hit the remote and actually see your garage door closing. Satisfied, you go on to work. Later in the day, you wife comes home for lunch. She calls you to ask why the garage door was open when she got home. Why didn’t you close it? You tell her that you did but either you forgot to do it or it opened on its own somehow.
There are so many possible scenarios; anyone of them is possible. Why not avoid all of them and just troubleshoot the problem yourself? Read on and see how you can do this.
If you tried to close your home or business garage door and it went back up instead, did you happen to notice a ticking sound or your lights blinking on and off? If so, this is a sure-fire sign that the problem is with your safety sensors. These are also known as your photoelectric safety eyes and they serve an important function; to keep your heavy garage door from smashing down on your car, your pets, your kids or yourself! This valuable safety feature is standard in most garage door openers and for good reason; it works. The problem is when one of your sensors is not aligned correctly or something is blocking the path of the beam. These things will make your garage door go back up, even after it has already started to close.
Good news! There’s really no need to order a garage door repair service call; you can make this simple adjustment yourself and in just a few minutes. Safety sensor manufacturers have made these electric eyes easy to adjust and unless you have actual damage to the lenses or are dealing with cut or frayed wires, you can do this yourself. Just manually adjust each sensor until the light comes back on. You don’t need special tools or training for this as you can literally do it with your hand. If you like, go online and YouTube has dozens of videos that show in detail how best to make this adjustment.
Many people are scared of spiders for fear of being bitten. Spiders can be helpful as they often eat other insects like mosquitos, flies and other nasty bugs. We have nothing against spiders, but we also don’t want them building webs on our safety sensors. For some odd reason, spiders love to drape our garage door safety eyes with their webs which attract leaves, dead bugs, twigs, dirt and other unsavory things. The build up from these webs can block the signal from your sensors and cause garage door closer problems. Use a twig and remove spider webs whenever found! Use a clean, dry cloth to keep your sensor lenses clear and always ready to transmit.
Keep sharp items away from your sensors. All too often shears, shovels, pruning scissors and pitchforks are stored in our garages and while nothing is wrong with keeping common gardening tools there, they can sometimes fall on or lean against our sensors and not only bump them out of alignment, but can also cut wires or fray cords that can lead to sensor problems and often, full replacement.
Pets also have been known to chew on wires and cords in the garage. This is not only bad for the pet (electric shock, cuts and swallowing) but it can damage your sensors, as well. Pets should not be kept in garages anyway but even if yours is just playing around with you there, keep them away from your sensor wires and cords.
Sometimes a garage door is not installed correctly and it will vibrate and rattle its way up or down when used. It may not be too noticeable at first, but over time, this action can loosen the hinges on your photoelectric safety eyes. This of course, throws off the alignment of the beam and causes your garage door to not close properly. This shoddy garage door installation is made worse when the door itself is particularly heavy as in the case of steel garage doors. The solution for this is NOT do-it-yourself! We recommend that you use an established garage door repair shop to make the adjustments so that your door and its components are installed correctly and safely.
This sometimes happens when water from a hose is squirted on to the sensors in order to clean them and it comes into contact with a frayed wire or damaged cord. Be sure to keep your wires and cords in good, working shape and clean your sensors with soft dry cloth instead of a power hose.
