It is almost always the evening. The gate is halfway across the driveway, the car is on the wrong side of it, and the operator is sitting there with a green light on doing nothing at all. Somebody has already tried the remote nine times.
The instinct at that point is that the motor has died. In our experience it usually has not. A driveway gate has more ways to refuse than a garage door does, and most of them are not failures. They are safety devices working correctly on information that has gone wrong.
A gate operator is not a big garage door opener
This is worth understanding because it changes what is likely to be broken.
A garage door opener is a small motor that moves a balanced door. The springs do the lifting; the opener only overcomes friction and inertia. Disconnect it and a healthy door still goes up by hand.
A gate has no springs. Nothing is counterbalancing anything. The operator does one hundred per cent of the work of moving several hundred pounds of steel or wood, usually across a slope, usually outdoors, usually through whatever the Valley has done to the driveway this year. There are two common families:
- Swing operators. An arm or a ram pushes the leaf open. Simple, and brutally exposed to what the hinge post is doing.
- Slide operators. A gear on the motor drives a toothed rack bolted along the gate. The gate rolls on wheels along a track set into the driveway.
Both are wired to the same three families of safety device, and those safety devices are where the calls come from.
The loop detector, which is the one nobody knows about
Cut into most commercial and a good number of residential driveways is a loop of wire buried in a saw kerf in the concrete, backfilled with sealant. It is not a sensor in the way a camera is a sensor. It is an inductor. A control box passes a small current through the loop and watches its resonant frequency. Park a large mass of metal over it and the inductance changes, and the box reports a vehicle.
This is a genuinely elegant piece of engineering and it has two ordinary failure modes. The sealant cracks and water gets into the kerf, which changes the loop’s electrical behaviour. Or the concrete moves, which around here it does, and the wire is stretched or broken outright.
A loop that has gone faulty does not announce itself. What you get is a gate that will not close because it believes a car is permanently sitting in the gateway, or a gate that will not open on exit because it can no longer see the car that is right there. Both look like a dead gate from the driver’s seat.
Photo eyes and safety edges
The other two are more familiar in shape. Photo eyes are the same beam-across-the-opening arrangement a garage door uses, and they fail in the same undignified ways: knocked out of alignment by a wheelbarrow, fogged, spidered over, or pointed at low winter sun that saturates the receiver.
A safety edge is a rubber strip along the leading edge of the gate with a switch or a pneumatic tube inside it. Squash it and the gate stops and reverses. Safety edges are outdoors for years, and eventually the strip perishes or a rodent finds the tube. A perished edge often reads as permanently pressed, which is a gate that will not move at all and gives no reason.
The shape of all three of these is the same and it is worth holding onto: a gate that will not move is more often a gate being told not to move than a gate that cannot.
What we actually check, in order
- Is there power, and is it real power. Many operators run a battery and charge it from the mains, so a gate can keep working for days after the circuit has been lost and then simply stop. A gate that got slower and slower for a week was a charging fault, not a motor fault.
- The control board’s own diagnostic. Nearly every modern board has an LED sequence or a display that names the input holding it up. Reading it takes seconds and skips most of the guesswork.
- Every safety input, disconnected one at a time. This is how a bad loop or a dead edge gets identified: not by testing the device, but by removing it and seeing whether the gate becomes willing.
- The mechanics, by hand. Release the operator and move the gate manually. If it is heavy, catching, or dragging on the driveway, the motor was never the problem. The motor was the thing that gave up trying to do a job that had got harder.
The money question, answered honestly
We are not going to print prices. A gate is too variable for that to be anything other than a guess or a bait. What we can give you is the ranking, which is stable:
Realigning a photo eye or reseating a connector is the cheapest thing that happens on a driveway. Replacing a safety edge or a loop detector module is a part and a visit. Cutting and installing a new loop is more, because it involves the driveway itself. A control board is the point where the number starts to feel serious. A complete operator is a different category of purchase, and hydraulic units for large or heavy leaves are the top of it.
The variable that moves it most is one people never expect: the gate itself. An operator sized for a gate that has since sagged, warped or picked up a decorative infill is an operator being asked to do more work than it was bought for. It will fail early no matter how good it is.
What not to buy
- Do not buy a bigger operator for a sagging gate. The hinge post is the problem. A stronger motor will drag a dropped gate across the concrete very confidently until something more expensive gives way.
- Do not buy a new operator when the board is available. Boards are supplied separately for most current models. Getting the board fitted is a fraction of the job and the mechanics are usually fine.
- Do not add a solar panel to fix a battery symptom. If a gate is dying each evening, find out whether the mains supply is actually reaching it first. Solar is a legitimate choice for a gate with no supply at all, and an expensive plaster over a tripped breaker.
- Do not accept a quote that skips the manual test. If nobody released the operator and pushed the gate by hand, nobody has established whether they are quoting on the right machine.
The short version
Gates are outdoor machines with indoor expectations. They stop for weather, for concrete movement, for a spider in a photo eye, and for a car that a broken loop thinks is still parked in the gateway. Very few of them stop because a motor burned out.
Which does mean that a decent number of our gate calls end with an alignment, a cleaned lens, and an apology for how little there was to do. We have made our peace with it.
J&A Garage Door Repair · (707) 200-7682 · jagaragedoorrepair.com
Lic. 1133099 · Serving Sacramento and the Central Valley.