Garage door won't close

The door has two electric eyes, and Mississippi keeps messing with them

Every opener since the early nineties refuses to close on anything its safety sensors object to. The sensors are the two little lenses facing each other across the bottom of the doorway, and nearly everything that interrupts them in Lee County arrives on a schedule the calendar could have predicted. So before adjusting anything, think about the season, then go look at the lenses. Both have small indicator lights; two steady lights mean aligned, one dark or winking marks the trouble.

Spring: the pollen film

Anyone who has watched a black truck turn yellow-green in April knows what our pollen season does to surfaces. Sensor lenses collect the same film, and a hazy lens scatters the beam enough to read as an obstruction. The whole repair is a thumb wipe or a soft cloth across both lenses. While you are down there, check that a garden hose or seed bag has not crept into the beam; spring garages fill up fast.

Summer: the wasps get a vote

Warm months bring two reliable offenders. Wasps and dirt daubers build on and behind sensor brackets, and a nest the size of a thumbnail can tip a lens out of aim. Knock it down once it is empty or spray it first if it is not. The second offender is the afternoon thunderstorm that blinks the power mid-cycle; some openers come back from an outage with their logic sulking, and unplugging the unit for thirty seconds and plugging it back in clears more of these than anyone admits.

Fall: what the trees drop

Pine straw, oak leaves, and sweetgum balls collect along the threshold and drift into the beam or under the door’s bottom seal. A door that closes, touches something soft, and lifts back up is doing exactly what its force setting requires. Sweep the threshold, and check the track channels while you are there; a wedged sweetgum ball in a track does a fine impression of a broken door. Lower autumn sun can also flood a west-facing lens late in the day; a door that closes fine at noon and refuses at five is telling you where the sun is.

Winter: the stiff seal

We only get a handful of hard freezes, but they earn their keep. The rubber bottom seal stiffens in the cold, and a door that pressed into wet concrete the evening before can grip the slab overnight. The opener then reads the resistance as an early floor and reopens. If the door refuses only on frosty mornings, the seal is your suspect, not the sensors, and warmth fixes what adjustment cannot.

When the calendar is innocent

A door that will not close in any season, with clean aligned lenses and a swept threshold, has a mechanical or settings problem: travel limits drifted, a binding roller, a force setting gone conservative. And a door that hangs crooked or shows a slack cable should not be closed at all; that is emergency territory. For everything past the wipe-and-sweep fixes, Tupelo’s number is (662) 407-6162, and the tune-up visit exists for doors that need their settings and hardware gone through properly.