Garage Door Electric Eye Fixes -- How to Fix Your Problem Quickly and Cheaply

Millions of people suffer greatly when their electric garage door openers stop working. What drives people crazy is when their door will not go down after the appropriate button or switch is pressed either inside the garage or on their car remote control. Instead of going down the door stops abruptly, goes back up and an inside light bulb on the motor box blinks. Assuming that nothing is actually blocking the electric eye beam, this is a malfunction. The electric eye beam system is an important government mandated safety system.
This safety system is designed to prevent the garage door from closing down on a person, especially a child, a pet or even a car or package that has not been properly located completely inside or outside the garage. The goal is not to disarm this safety system, but to ensure it works properly.

But there are conditions causing the system to falsely believe that something is blocking the invisible beam sent from the device on one side of the door inside the garage to the device on the other side; both are a small distance from the floor and one sends the beam, the other receives it. The receiver must receive an uninterrupted beam to maintain an electric circuit that allows the door to close smoothly.

Note that most of us who have suffered with this problem learn that when the door refuses to close you can still lower it by depressing the button on the inside of your garage and holding it down until the door fully closes. This does solve your immediate problem, but it will not work by trying the same approach on your remote control inside your car or another battery operated control mounted just outside the garage door.

I have had to deal with this problem on a number of occasions in recent decades, as millions of others also have. This is proven by countless websites where desperate people seek solutions for this non-closing garage door problem. The problem is that many of websites out of ignorance or evil offer solutions that cannot work or suffer for other reasons. Some suggest ways to circumvent this safety system.

Here are a few examples of widely offered bad solutions. Pull out the wires going into both electric eye devices; this is nonsense because an open circuit acts like a blocked beam. Relocate both devices from the sides of the garage door to some location above the garage door such that only a short space is between the device openings where the beam emerges and is received. This not only is a lot of work, but it obviously removes the safety system, a violation of local legal requirements. Third, is the suggestion that you can somehow connect the wires coming from both devices at the back of the motor-control box on the ceiling. This is beyond the skill of most people and could damage your opener and still may not actually work, and it too cancels the safety system.

So, now, let me give you the two most commonly successful fixes for this garage door closing problem. First, I want to emphasize the wisdom of not immediately calling a garage door repair service, for two reasons. Odds are you can fix this problem yourself in a few minutes. Worse, you are likely to pay a lot of money and either the repair person will just do what you can do or wrongly say one or more expensive components must be replaced.

What you should do immediately upon facing this problem is carefully examine both electric eye devices and make sure there is no dirt, dust, debris or spider web on the front glass on both devices. Even if just one of them has obstructions your safety system will interpret them as beam blocks.

If this action does not fix the problem, the odds are that a misalignment of the devices is causing the beam to not fully be sensed by the receiving device; this is the one that if you put your hand in front of, then the small light on the side of the device goes out. You should carefully look at the receiving device and move the metal holder attached to the wall a little bit in different directions until you see the light stay bright and steady. Just make sure that you have reoriented the metal holder enough so that the light stays on. A flickering light will cause the system to not operate correctly; this is an indication that the beam is not fully striking the receiving device lens. Odds are that you must move the device holder parallel to the floor, and not up or down.

There is a slight possibility that bright sunlight hitting the devices might stop proper operation. To check this, take a news paper or piece of cardboard to block the sun and see if the system operates correctly, or if it malfunctions only in sunlight but operates correctly at night.

Follow this advice and you have a 90 plus percent chance of fixing your problem without spending a lot of money on a repair service call. Why not 100 percent? It is conceivable that some component in the motor-control box has failed.