What to Do When Your Garage Door Won't Close

05/11/2018

Uh-oh! Your garage door is stuck. What’s next? What do you do when your garage door won’t close? Do you call a professional maintenance worker right away, or do you do some tinkering on your own? On one hand, you could end up paying a lot of money to fix a relatively simple problem, on the other you could worsen the situation.

Here are our recommendations for what to do when your garage door won’t close:

1. Scan the situation

The first step to take when your garage door won’t close is to look around and do a visual check. See if there is something under the door, or blocking the safety sensors.

2. Check Safety Sensor

Now, if there is nothing physically blocking the door and sensors, you can check the safety sensors to ensure they are clean and correctly aligned. Often time, as the garage is a dusty place, susceptible to dirt and grime, the sensors get dirty. Even a cobweb can cover the lens - preventing it from working properly.

3. Try the Wall Station

If these don’t seem to resolve the issue, you can move on to the wall station of the garage door opener. Here, try to press and hold the interior wall station, using constant pressure until the door touches the ground.

If the door closes with this method, then the issue lies with the safety sensor. Sometimes the electrical circuit boards, inside the photo safety sensors, get shorted when wet or if there was a power surge or lightning strike. You can clean and re-aligning the sensors quickly and easily! No professionals needed.

4. Use the Manual Release Cord

For our last DIY fix - use the manual release cord. It’s located on the garage door opener and it should release the garage door opener from the doors so that you can lower the garage door by yourself manually. Your door should have a handle on the bottom section of the door. This will help you lower the door once released from the opener.

5. Call a professional

Lastly, if all else fails, call a qualified garage door technician. There are certain things that might be causing the issue, that you will be unable to resolve on your own. A professional will be able to help with any binding issues, or if your garage door needs a tune-up.

It’s important to remember that garage door openers only work as well as the garage door on its own. If the door will not lift manually, then the garage door opener will not be able to do the job either. To learn more about how the door and the door opener work together, read about the top three reasons your garage door opener isn’t working.

As garage doors lead directly into our homes, it can be a stressful situation when your garage won’t shut! We hope you have a better understanding of what may be happening when your door is stuck, and how you can get to the root of the issue without spending on unnecessary maintenance, or making the problem worse.