The instinct is to get the door closed. The right instinct is to establish whether the door is safe to touch at all, because a door that will not close is sometimes a door that should not be moved by hand.
Make it safe first
- Keep everyone away from the opening while you work on it.
- Do not stand under or in front of the door if it is unsupported.
- Clear any obstruction between the sensors or in the path of the door.
- Clean both sensor lenses and check the units are aligned and firmly mounted.
- Check whether the door is square in its opening, or leaning and off its rollers.
Why a stuck-open door matters beyond convenience
Two separate concerns, and the second is the more urgent one.
Security. An open garage in a residential street is exposed. The contents are visible, the house may have internal access through it, and it is simply an invitation. This is why a door that will not close is worth treating as a real fault rather than something to live around.
Stability. Depending on the cause, an open door may be held in place only by a spring or a bracket that is about to fail. A door whose springs have been compromised, or whose bottom brackets have sheared, can come down without much warning. This is a real scenario, and it is why the instruction to keep clear of the opening matters.
Why a door will not close
| What happens | Most likely cause |
|---|---|
| Nothing happens at all, lights flashing | Safety sensors blocked, dirty, or misaligned |
| Closes then reverses partway | Misalignment, or a binding door or track |
| Stops just short every time | Travel limit set too high |
| Stops at the same height, with a scrape | Door off its rollers, or a bent track |
| Stops and the door sounds strained | Out of balance, or a failed drive |
| Drifts down and lands crooked | Broken cable or spring on an extension-spring door |
| Nothing moves and the door is heavy by hand | Springs or cables have failed |
The last two rows are the ones where pushing the door is a bad idea.
Making the opening secure
If the door will not close, securing the opening is the priority rather than the repair.
- Do not operate it repeatedly. Every cycle puts the failing hardware through another load cycle, and if the cause is a bracket or spring, you are shortening the time you have.
- Support the door if it is heavy. If it is being held by compromised hardware, propping or supporting it protects the door and the people near it.
- Secure the opening. If the door will not close, a locked side or rear door, or a secondary barrier, is worth arranging while the repair is sorted. We can talk through the options for your garage.
- Call rather than work around it. Some of the causes — a sheared bottom bracket, a broken cable, a collapsed track section — are not problems to improvise around.
Stopping it happening again
Almost every cause of a door that will not close is preceded by a warning that is easy to ignore:
- A rubbing or scraping noise at the same point in the travel, which means the door is already out of square.
- A heavier feel by hand, which means the balance has drifted and the springs are under more load than they should be.
- Intermittent reversing rather than consistent closing, which is a sensor or track issue that will eventually stop entirely.
- A visible gap or a lean in the door when open, which is a bracket or track anchor problem.
Every one of those is worth a call while it is still a small job. A tune-up is specifically the visit that catches them, and it is the cheapest garage door work there is.
Related services & problems
These usually go together, because the same underlying wear shows up in more than one place.