Garage Door Will Not Close in Ann Arbor, MI Working Down the Causes

Start by learning how it refuses

There are three distinct refusals and they are not interchangeable. The door travels partway down and returns fully up: the operator aborted the close, which means the beam, the sensing edge, or the close-force limit. The door does not move at all and the head clicks or the wall button lights: that is a control, lock or limit problem. The door starts down, stops dead, and stays where it is: that is drag in the door itself, or an obstruction, or the close limit set short. Ask which of the three is happening before anything else, then match it against the full repair index. Every remaining step below assumes you have answered that first question honestly.

The Ann Arbor cause that gets missed: the seal frozen to the slab

This one is genuinely local and it produces a fault no diagnostic tree from a warm state contains. Meltwater and salted slush run off a car and pool at the threshold. Overnight it refreezes, and the flexible bottom astragal bonds to the concrete. The next morning the opener starts the close, meets a door already stuck at the bottom on the way back up, or completes the close and cannot lift, and the safety system reads ice as an obstruction. DASMA's sheet on water infiltration under a sectional door describes the remedy in construction terms, a sill inclined 3 to 5 degrees or a notch cut in the slab lip, neither of which is present in most older garages here. Where the slab is flat or pitches inward, as it does behind many alley-facing garages in the Old West Side, the water has nowhere to go but under the seal.

The photo eyes, checked properly

Look at the two eyes near the floor, clear anything in the beam, and wipe both lenses. Then look at the indicator lights rather than guessing: one dark or flickering light on the receiver means the pair is not communicating. Salt haze, a bracket knocked out of aim by a snow shovel, and a pinched wire under a staple are the three usual culprits, in that order. If the door closes normally when someone holds the wall button down continuously on a unit that allows it, the beam is the fault. Do not disable the eyes to force the door shut. That removes the entrapment protection Title 16 Part 1211 requires and leaves the actual problem in place.

Close force, travel limits, and the manual lock

If the beam is sound, the next suspect is force. As a door stiffens, the operator needs more push, and when it exceeds its programmed limit it reads resistance as an obstruction. Winding the force up is the wrong response twice over. Next is the close travel limit, which can drift so the operator thinks the floor is an inch lower than it is, stalls against the slab and reverses. Then there is the manual slide bolt or T-handle lock: a door that was locked by hand and is now being driven by a motor will strain, bind and reverse, and on a detached garage in the Northside where the original hardware is still fitted, that is a regular finding.

Drag in the door, and what the visit does about it

Pull the release with the door closed and lift it by hand. It should move freely and hold near waist height. A door that fights you, or drops, or hangs crooked has a mechanical fault, and the opener was reporting it accurately. Bent track, a cracked roller, a frayed cable, a broken spring and rust binding the bottom brackets all present this way. A visit works the same order in reverse: hand test the door first, correct the mechanical drag, then set the force and limits to the corrected door, then verify the reversal at the beam and at contact. Correcting the door before touching the operator is the difference between a repair and a symptom that returns in two weeks. Related pages cover sensor repair and weather seal replacement.