Garage Door Opener Repair
Drive, board, limit and safety-sensor faults diagnosed before parts are changed.
View serviceGarage Door Will Not Close: Work Through It In Order
A door that lifts happily and then refuses to close is usually being stopped deliberately. The job is working out what it believes it is protecting you from.
Short answer
Clear the whole floor line first, then clean both photo-eye lenses and confirm each indicator light is on and steady rather than flickering. A broken or misaligned beam tells the operator to reverse. If the beam is sound and the door still stops, look for ice bonded to the bottom seal, a seized roller, a bent track section or an uneven gap when the door is nearly down. Do not increase the closing force to push through resistance.
Almost every current operator is designed to reverse rather than to crush, so a refusal to close is normally the safety system acting on information that may or may not be accurate. That is encouraging, because the likely causes sit low down where you can see them: something across the threshold, a lens dulled by road grime, a sensor bracket knocked out of aim, or a ridge of ice that formed overnight after the previous afternoon thawed. It only becomes a mechanical question once those have been ruled out. Order matters here, because every forced attempt adds wear, and turning up the closing force to defeat a real obstruction is precisely how a nuisance turns into a repair bill. Burlington adds a specific variable: with a January average high of minus 0.6 degrees the ground in front of a garage spends the season crossing the freezing point rather than staying frozen, and on the sloped driveways of Brant Hills and Mountainside the meltwater runs toward the door rather than away from it.
Diagnose in order
Work Through These Checks
Start at the top. The early checks are the most common causes and need no tools.
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Clear the floor line completely
Move bins, tools, hoses, sports gear and packed snow well away from the opening, then look along the full width of the bottom seal for a stone, a curled mat, a bag or a ridge of frozen slush. Make one closing attempt once the path is clear and note exactly where the door stops or reverses.
What it means: A clean close after clearing means you had a simple obstruction and nothing more.
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Clean and check the photo eyes
The two sensors sit low on either side of the opening, usually within six inches of the floor. Wipe both lenses with a dry cloth, since salt spray and grit build up quickly in a garage used through a Burlington winter, and confirm each indicator light is lit and steady. Flickering or dark points at alignment or wiring.
What it means: Steady lights on clean, squarely facing lenses rule the safety beam out.
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Check the brackets and the wiring run
A bracket clipped by a bumper, a bike or a snow shovel puts the beam off aim without looking wrong to the eye. Follow the low-voltage wire back along the wall for pinched staples, breaks or rodent damage, which is more common in detached and unheated garages than people expect.
What it means: A knocked bracket or a damaged wire run explains a reversal on its own.
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Look for ice and standing water at the seal
After a thaw and an overnight refreeze the bottom weatherstrip can bond to the slab or sit on a lip of ice, so the door meets resistance in the last few inches and reverses. Check whether the driveway drains toward the opening, and whether the seal is hardened, torn or missing sections.
What it means: Resistance in the final inches during cold weather usually means ice rather than electronics.
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Move the door by hand and watch it
Use the release only if the door is fully closed and nothing looks broken, then move the door by hand. Feel for a point where it binds, listen for grinding, and look for a chipped roller, a bent track section, a loose hinge or a widening gap at one jamb as the leaf travels.
What it means: Binding or grinding by hand is mechanical and needs hardware attention, not an adjustment.
Where to stop
Know the Limit
Stop if the door is visibly out of square, if a cable is slack or hanging, if you can see a gap or a break in a spring coil, or if the leaf drops when you let go of it by hand. Those are counterbalance failures, and each further attempt to close the door risks pulling it further out of alignment or dropping it. Do not increase the operator's force settings to overcome resistance, and never disable a photo-eye sensor to make a door close, because that system is the only thing standing between the closing path and a child or a pet.
Local conditions
Why It Happens Here
The threshold is where Burlington's weather does its work. Seasonal snowfall here is 99.9 centimetres over 25.5 snowy days, which is genuinely modest for southern Ontario because Lake Ontario moderates the climate, but 34.2 centimetres of it falls in January, and the January average high of minus 0.6 degrees means daytime melt followed by overnight refreeze rather than a steady freeze. That cycle is what produces the ice lip at the seal. Grade compounds it in the north-west, where Brant Hills sits on sloping tree-lined streets shaped by hilly escarpment terrain and Mountainside climbs toward the same escarpment, so the drive frequently falls toward the opening. In Alton Village and The Orchard, where driveways are short, the other pattern shows up instead: a vehicle parked closer to the door and more clutter within reach of the sensor beam.
Questions
Common Questions
Why does my door close at some times of day and not others?
Two causes account for most of it. Low winter sun striking a photo-eye receiver directly can wash out the beam, which makes the fault appear and disappear with the hour. And on a driveway that drains toward the garage, meltwater that arrives during a mild afternoon refreezes at the seal after dark, so the door closes at two and refuses at seven. Note the time and the weather when it happens, because that pattern is genuinely diagnostic.
The sensor lights look fine. What next?
Move to the mechanical side. Disconnect the operator with the door closed and lift it by hand, feeling for a point where it binds and listening for grinding. Look for a chipped or seized roller, a bent track section, a loose hinge, and an uneven gap at one jamb when the door is nearly down. If the door is heavy or will not hold position halfway, the counterbalance is the issue and the operator was only reporting it.
Can I just adjust the down force so it closes?
Please do not. The force setting is a safety limit, not a convenience dial: raising it tells the operator to keep pushing against resistance instead of reversing, which is how a door bends sections, pops rollers out of the track or strips its drive gear. Worse, it degrades the protection that stops a closing door on contact with a person. Find out what the resistance is and remove it, rather than teaching the door to ignore it.
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Where We Work
These guides are written for Burlington homes. If the fix is beyond a homeowner check, we work everywhere inside this area.
Map data © Google. Pin shows the service area, not a walk-in location — all work is done at your home.
From the tools
A real callout, not stock imagery.
A sectional door pulled off its tracks, taken down and supported on site so it could be checked and re-hung safely — photographed on the job.