Garage Doors And Automatic Gates

Most building faults annoy a few people. A failed garage door annoys everyone at once, usually at 7am.

The fault is rarely the motor

The motor is the expensive part, so it gets blamed first. It is almost never the problem.

Sensors. A safety beam across the opening stops the door closing on a car or a person. Knock one out of alignment, cover one in cobwebs, or let one get dirty, and the door refuses to close or reverses halfway. This is the single most common callout.

Springs and cables. On a tilt or sectional door, springs carry almost all the weight. When one fatigues and breaks, the motor is suddenly lifting a door several times heavier than it was designed for, and it strains or stops. A broken spring is also dangerous, because the door can drop.

Tracks and rollers. Worn rollers and bent tracks make the door bind. The motor works harder, then trips out.

The remote and receiver. Flat batteries, a lost code, or interference. Simple, and frequently the whole answer.

The chain or belt. Stretched over time, so the door does not reach its limits and the motor keeps hunting.

Sliding gates have their own list

The rack and pinion, which is the toothed strip the motor drives against. Debris in the teeth stops the gate dead.

The track itself, which collects leaves, gravel and water. A sliding gate in a driveway sits at the lowest point of the property, so everything washes into it.

Ground movement, which throws the gate out of alignment so the rollers bind on one side.

Where strata makes it harder

A garage door on common property serves every resident, so a fault is urgent by definition.

That usually means an after-hours response, and it means the access system has to keep working through the repair. Propping a door open for a day is a security problem for the whole building, so temporary security is part of the job rather than an afterthought.

The door also interacts with the [intercom and access control](/blog/intercom-and-access-control-upgrades) system. Where residents enter by fob or app, a fault can sit in either system, and the two are frequently supplied by different contractors. Tracing which one has failed is the first job.

Servicing is genuinely worth it

This is one of the few pieces of building equipment where scheduled servicing clearly pays.

Lubrication of tracks and hinges. Spring tension checked and adjusted. Sensor alignment and cleaning. Fasteners checked, because vibration loosens them. Safety reverse tested, which matters most of all.

A door that gets serviced runs for many years. A door that only gets attention when it breaks fails at the worst possible time, and the failures are progressively more expensive.

The safety test nobody runs

Place something solid under the closing door. It should hit, stop and reverse.

If it does not, the auto-reverse is not working, and that is a door that can close on a child or a car. It is the one check worth doing on any door that has not been serviced recently.

What to do when it fails

Do not keep pressing the button. If the door is straining, running it again turns a spring replacement into a motor replacement.

Most doors have a manual release so the door can be operated by hand until it is repaired. Knowing where that release is, before the day you need it, saves a building a great deal of trouble.