When your home's garage door is not closing, it could be an issue with broken sensors. A safety feature of your garage door is that it has sensors that prevent it from closing on anything that crosses its path. This includes cars, children, and objects left in the path of the garage door. Before you contact a professional for repair, try these tricks to see if you can fix it yourself.

Locate The Sensors

There should be two sensors on opposite sides of your garage door near the tracks. It works with one sensor sending a signal to the other, so both sensors must be in perfect alignment for the safety measure to work properly. If a sensor has accidentally been knocked out of alignment, you may encounter problems with your garage door not closing.

If one of the sensors is clearly not pointing towards the other, that is most likely your problem.

Inspect The Lights

Look for a tiny red or green light located on the sensors. A flickering light typically means there is a problem with the sensor's alignment. If you adjust the sensors manually, the light should stop flickering when both of the sensors are aligned once again.

If you have properly aligned sensors, and the garage door won't close, keep troubleshooting the sensors.

Verify The Connections

Those red or green lights can flicker if you have an issue with the wires going to the sensor. In that situation, realigning the sensors won't matter. Issues with wiring can also cause those lights to not illuminate, meaning they are not receiving the proper voltage to power up.

You'll need to verify that all connections to the sensor are tight. If there are plugs going into the sensor itself, push on them to ensure that they are plugged in all the way. Do the same to the connection on the garage door opener as well.

If you have a solid connection, and the lights still do not turn on, it could be an issue with the circuitry located inside your sensor. You'll need to replace the sensor with a brand new one.

Clean Off The Lens

When everything else seems like it is working properly, try cleaning off the lenses of the sensors. It's possible that they are so dirty that it is interfering with the operation of the sensors. Just clean them off using a damp cloth.

If all these tips have failed to fix the problem, contact a professional in your area, like Overhead Door Co. of Everett Inc., that can help diagnose the problem for you.

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