3 Reasons Your Garage Door Won’t Close
Here’s a scenario that can ruin your morning: You’re running late for work, you hop in your car, pull out of your garage, hit the button on the remote control for your garage door opener, but the door doesn’t close. You can’t leave the house with the garage door open. At the very least, you’re going to be late to work, as you try to troubleshoot the problem.
Hopefully, you’ll never find yourself in this situation. But if you do, following are some of the reasons your door might be jammed.
- Safety Sensor Malfunction
If the door begins to close but stops short of the ground, the problem may be your safety sensors – those gadgets at the bottom of your garage door that keep it from closing on your foot. When sensors are knocked out of alignment, or if one of the sensor eyes is dirty, the door won’t close all the way. Usually, the tiny lights on sensors are solid; if they’re blinking, you can try realigning them.
- Faulty Remote
If you can close the door using the wall switch, you might just have a faulty remote control. Remotes may also experience radio frequency interference that disrupts communication with the unit that opens your garage door. Even LED light bulbs near the opener can disrupt the radio signal. Try turning off lights and wireless devices in or near the garage, to test for radio frequency interference. Ultimately, you may need a new opener, or you may need to change the frequency band at which the remote and opener communicate.
- Limit Switch Adjustment
Garage door openers have a limit switch that controls how far the door moves when it opens or closes. If, when the door is open, you continue to hear the opener motor running and can’t close the door, that’s probably due to a limit switch problem. Essentially, the motor is running because the opener is still trying to open the door
