What Is Wrong With My Garage Door?

That noise is almost always a torsion spring letting go, and it usually happens overnight because the spring sits at full wind while the door is closed. Look above the opening for a two or three inch gap in the coil. With the counterweight gone the opener has no chance of lifting the door, so pull the release cord and leave it shut.

Torsion Springs · Broken Spring Replacement

A lift cable has come off its drum or parted, so one side dropped and the other took the whole load. On this coast cables corrode from inside the wire strands, which is why they go with almost no visible warning. Do not run the opener and do not pull on the door, because the weight can shift suddenly.

Lift Cables · Garage Door Cable Repair

Either a spring or a cable has failed, or a roller has stepped out of its channel and jammed. Whatever the cause, the garage is standing open to the street, so this is the one symptom worth treating as urgent even when nothing looks broken. Keep people and cars out from underneath it.

Emergency Garage Door Repair

Usually something nudged a vertical track months ago and a roller finally met the kink at the wrong moment, or a cable let go and racked the door. Levering it back with a crowbar is where most of the real damage comes from: the channel bends further and the section edge gets crushed.

Off-Track Garage Door Repair

The motor is reading resistance it cannot overcome and giving up, which points at a broken spring rather than at the opener. Release the opener and try lifting the door by hand. If it feels like dead weight instead of about ten pounds, the counterweight has gone.

Torsion Springs · Broken Spring Replacement

The opener believes something is in the opening, and it is meant to. Most often a photo eye has been knocked out of line by a bike or a bin, or the lens has picked up a salt haze. Next most likely is a travel limit set so low the door presses into the slab and the motor reads the floor as an obstruction.

Safety Sensors

This is a west-facing garage problem and it catches people out every year here. Low sun coming off the Pacific shines straight up the driveway into the receiving photo eye and swamps the infrared beam. Shading that sensor or swapping which side sends and which receives fixes it. The parts are not faulty.

Safety Sensors

The drive has lost its connection to the door. On a household opener that is usually a stripped drive gear, a cracked trolley, or a sheared shaft. If the door has been run on a broken spring for a few days, the gear is the first thing to check, because dragging the full weight of a door is exactly what strips it.

Garage Door Opener Repair

Ten tired rollers, with the bearings out of grease and full of grit. Near the beach the cause is usually blown sand collecting in the bottom foot of the vertical tracks, which every cycle then drags a roller through. Brush the channels out dry first, and leave the grease out of the track because it holds the sand.

Rollers

That is a shaft bearing that has rusted dry, not the opener, and it is worth catching early. A bearing left squealing eventually cuts a groove into the shaft it turns in, at which point a few dollars of part becomes a shaft, a set of drums and the springs off and back on again.

Garage Door Cable Repair

Nine times out of ten a hinge, either split at the plate or binding on a corroded pin, letting go suddenly as the door turns from vertical to horizontal. Stand inside with the door moving slowly and you can normally see which one flexes as it passes. It works on the panel edges either side until it is dealt with.

Salt Air & Rust Repair

That pattern points at the cable drums rather than the tracks. If one drum sits out of position by a fraction of a turn, one cable takes up faster than the other and the difference builds over seven feet of travel. A worn groove or a cable overwrapping itself does the same thing.

Garage Door Cable Repair

Extension springs work independently, one per side, so nothing makes them share the load. When one weakens or breaks that side stops lifting and the door racks in the opening. While you are looking, check whether a safety cable runs through the middle of each coil, because on the older beach housing it is missing more often than not.

Broken Spring Replacement

Something above that corner is shedding corrosion, and the two candidates both matter. Either the lift cable is breaking up inside its strands, or the bottom bracket that the cable loops onto is thinning. Both carry half the door under full spring tension, so neither is a wait and see.

Lift Cables · Salt Air & Rust Repair

Rust bleeding out of a hinge screw, a handle bolt or a strut fastener, then washing down the panel whenever the door gets wet. The streak itself is cosmetic. What it tells you is that the same thing is happening to fixings you cannot see, which makes it a good moment to have the hinges, brackets and roller stems looked over.

Salt Air & Rust Repair

Either the bottom seal has taken a set and no longer reaches the slab, or the lowest section has bowed slightly, which happens on wide single skin doors over time. A new seal fixes the first. The second wants a strut across the back or a taller seal profile to bridge the difference.

The seal around the opening has given up, and it is usually not the bottom piece that gets missed but the stop moulding down the sides. Wind driven sand comes in around the edges of a door as well as underneath it. Worth dealing with, because that sand ends up in the bottom track and then in the roller bearings.

Nearly always the battery, even when the little light on the remote still comes on, because sending takes far more current than lighting an LED. If a fresh battery does not fix it, look at the bulbs in the opener: cheap LEDs are a well known source of radio interference on the frequency these receivers listen to.

Usually a battery and terminal problem rather than a programming one. A keypad on an unshaded wall here takes salt haze every morning and sun every afternoon, so the rubber membrane cracks and the terminals corrode green. Mounting the replacement under an eave is what makes the next one last.

Something is not true at that spot. A flat area on one roller, a dented section of track, a hinge catching, or a bracket that has shifted. Watch it from inside at slow speed and the location usually gives away which. Caught early it is one part; left alone the whole set wears against the fault.

Rollers · Off-Track Garage Door Repair

Classic marine layer behavior. Hardware sits damp overnight, the film of lubricant has thinned, and dry metal complains until friction warms it. It is a signal rather than a fault, and it means the protective film on the stems, hinge pins and bearings is due for renewal before wear starts.

Rollers

The balance has drifted, which means the springs no longer match the door. This is the fault most worth fixing even though nothing has actually broken, because an out of balance door makes the opener drag weight it was never sized for and quietly destroys drive gears, rails and top brackets.

Torsion Springs