Garage Door Opener Safety Sensor Not Working

Two types of accidental obstructions can cause the safety sensor to prevent a garage door from closing.

Garage door opener safety sensor not working.

Sensors are a critical safety feature but can prevent an automatic garage door from working properly. The photo eye sensor for a garage door opener is typically placed approximately two inches off of the ground. This can happen from old age your basic wear and tear or even constant exposure to the sunlight. Look for small led lights on the sensors.

If your sensors or garage door motor is blinking or your door doesn t close it s a sign you could have faulty sensors. Damaging a photo eye sensor will also cause an opener to fail. If you find the lights turned off in one or both the sensors it indicates that there is a problem in power supply. As we have established earlier garage door safety sensors are not universal and will only work with garage door openers of the same brand.

An incorrectly adjusted garage door opener and sensor can cause damage to the garage door motor lift mechanism your house or worse a person or pet. When your garage door opener is not responding to any command from the remote or the door control you need to check if the opener has electricity. If the wiring is fine and your garage door opener is still not working then the problem may be that one of the sensors has simply failed. If they re turned on in both the sensors then there is no issue with the power supply.

Replacing the safety sensors is not a complicated job and is somewhat easy. A simple way to do this is to unplug the garage door opener and then plug in another device say your phone or a light bulb to see if it lights up. Cycle the garage door through the opening and closing actions using the control on the garage wall or the remote unit from a vehicle. Here are the two main exceptions to the rule.

Light doesn t activate on garage door opener when you cross safety sensor beam chamberlain group products which include the liftmaster chamberlain sears craftsman line of garage door openers have a feature where the opener light will turn on if you cross the safety sensor beam shooting across the opening of your garage door. Luckily you can set most automatic garage doors to a manual mode to bypass the sensors. If you own a liftmaster chamberlain or craftsman garage door opener the same safety sensor will work on all three brands. If the door does not close completely without hesitation.

The first is an obstruction in the path of the door and therefore in the path of the sensor.