Having a garage is a great way to help protect your vehicle and add some extra storage space to your home. One of the most convenient features of any garage is having an automatic door opener and closer. This saves you the hassle of manually opening your door whenever you need to get in or out of your garage. Unfortunately, from time to time, you may notice that your garage door won’t completely shut. There could be a few different culprits causing this particular issue, which we’re going to discuss below.
Misaligned or Dirty Sensors
Probably one of the most common issues that causes your garage door not to shut the whole way is its safety sensors. These sensors sit close to the ground on the inside of your garage door. They must be in proper alignment to allow an invisible beam to travel between the two. Anything that comes through this beam will kick the safety sensor and cause your door to reopen to prevent it from crushing what’s underneath it. While this safety feature is perfect for protecting your kids and pets if they happen to run underneath your closing garage door, it can be a real pain when the sensor malfunctions.
One reason that the sensors malfunction is that they’re misaligned with one another. If they’re not in proper alignment, the beam can’t pass between the two sensors and they will constantly read that there’s an obstruction in the door’s path.
Another issue with the sensors is that their photo eye can get dirty and prevent the beam from traveling between the two sensors. If the issue doesn’t lie with their alignment or dirty sensor eyes, then the safety sensor may simply be faulty and need to undergo replacement.
Broken Springs or Cables
For your garage door to move up and down, it has a couple of cables. These cables will wind around a drum to bring the door into an up position and unwind to allow the door to drop down. Unfortunately, if the cables snap or become cut, the garage door won’t be able to move. It will essentially be stuck in the up position. Identifying snapped cables is fairly easy to do. You’ll need to have a professional expert repair the garage door cables to get it working again.
Track Obstructions
One of the simplest reasons that your door may not close is that there’s something stuck in the track that’s preventing it from coming the whole way down. Even if there’s only an obstruction on one side of the tracks, the garage door will naturally kick back open when it faces resistance. This is another building safety feature to prevent excessive damage from happening to your garage door. Fortunately, simply removing whatever is in the track should remedy this problem so that your door can completely close.
Remote Issues
Another reason that your garage door may be stuck in its up position and won’t close is that your remote is not working properly. You can easily test it by using the manual pin pad to see if your door will close. If it does, then you can verify that the issue is indeed with your remote. Make sure the child lock isn’t on, and change out the batteries to see if that solves the problem. If not, then you’ll probably need to reprogram the remote to your opener, as it lost its original programming.
Faulty Opener Motor
Most garage door openers will last for around 10 to 15 years. As they near the end of their lifespan, many will start to slow down the movement of your door. Eventually, if the motor completely gives out, your door will be stuck in either the open or closed position depending on when the motor dies. If your door is in the out position when the motor fails, then it will be stuck there until the motor gets replaced.
If you noticed that your door was operating much slower than usual before it got stuck, then it’s likely an opener motor issue. It’s very common for homeowners to simply invest in a brand new garage door opener instead of replacing its internal motor due to the higher upfront cost of doing so.
Damaged Tracks
Another reason that your garage door may not close the whole way is that its track is physically damaged. All garage doors will have rollers that go down a predetermined track to open and close the door. Whenever there is any sort of excessive bend or damage to that track, it can restrict the ability of the roller to free flow through it.
If your door seems to be stuck on its way down at the same position each time, then you may have damage to the track at that location that’s restricting the roller from moving any further. While you can try to bend the track back to its normal position, it’s best to have one of our garage door professionals assess it for integrity issues.
Bent Door
One of the more obvious reasons that your garage door may not close the whole way is that the door itself is damaged. This typically happens whenever something physically comes into contact with your door, like a vehicle, or due to very high wind gusts. If your door gets bent out of place, it’s going to struggle to roll along the tracks correctly.
In a lot of cases, the door will simply bind up on the tracks and won’t go down the whole way. In most cases, we don’t recommend trying to bend the door back into its original position. Rather, it’s better to replace the entire garage door with a new one.
Bad Limit Settings
If you’ve recently had your garage door replaced and it’s no longer closing correctly, it could be due to bad limit settings. The garage door opener has internal limit screws that are responsible for letting the garage door know how far it needs to open and close. These screws can be manually adjusted to allow you to set exactly where you want your garage door to stop when it comes down.
Trolley Is Disconnected
All garage doors are connected to a trolley carriage. If you look at the top of your garage, it’s going to be the rail that connects the opener and the door. All trolleys will have an emergency disengage rope that allows you to pull down on the rope whenever you want to disengage the door from the trolley. If you notice that the door isn’t moving on the trolley carriage, you can try pulling on the disengaged cable to see if it will reengage the door to the trolley system. If pulling on the cord doesn’t work to reengage the trolley, then the trolley carriage itself may need to undergo replacement service.
Expert Garage Door Repair Service
Halls Garage Doors offers expert residential garage door repair services to the Roanoke Valley, VA area. We can also assist with all your commercial, garage door opener, and garage door installation needs. Phone our office today to book your next service consultation.
