How to Bypass Garage Door Sensors
Once you find your garage door reverses before it closes, you should blame the garage door safety sensors. The garage door opener sensors are electric devices that might eventually malfunction. When dealing with them, it’s best to call a garage door repair company.
However, if you want to use your garage door in the meantime, you can bypass garage door sensors. Doing this is only a temporary fix since it’s best to know the sensors’ root cause of the problem.
Read further below if you want to know how to bypass garage door sensors.
How Garage Door Sensors Work
Garage door opener sensors prevent accidents that could happen to your car, family, or even your pets. Therefore, they are part of the automatic mechanism of the garage door system. Garage door sensors perform mechanically, as they prompt the door to stay open before touching the object in the way. Hence, this makes the sensors an essential feature of the garage door.
Moreover, sensors use infrared light near the ground on both sides of the garage door. These sensors’ eyes meet each other, and that’s where the mechanism starts. If an object blocks the beam’s path, the door immediately reverses. Otherwise, it will continue to close.
How to Determine a Damaged Garage Door Sensor
You’ll determine right away if there’s a problem with the garage door sensors. The garage door sensor yellow starts to blink during the operation. The door also fails to close even if there’s no object in the path.
Moreover, some of the causes of malfunctioning sensors are due to dirt, misalignment, and faulty wirings. If an object bumps into the sensors, it will often lead to misalignment. This misalignment would also cause damage to garage door sensor wires.
Things to Do Before Bypassing Garage Door Sensors
How to trick garage door sensors involves a small degree of DIY knowledge. Now before you head onto the actual steps, these are the things you need to do:
Clean the Sensor Lenses
Before bypassing the sensors, clean the sensor lenses. This is to make sure the infrared beam meets each other. If the cleaning doesn’t work, proceed to the next step.
Check the Path
You need to check if any objects are blocking the path. If you don’t see anything, the sunlight might be causing the problems.
The sunlight pointing directly at the photo-eye may result in a lost connection. For this reason, move the sensors away from the sunlight and see if the sensors are working again.
Check the Alignment
If the sensors appear to have lights, they are working correctly. The lights you usually see are garage door sensor yellow or green lights. If they look solid enough, then the sensors are in good condition. Otherwise, there might be alignment issues.
If you want to know how to adjust garage door sensors, refer to the garage door’s manual. However, it’s best to rely on a professional to perform this task.
How to Bypass Garage Door Sensors
After doing the steps above and your garage door fails to operate, follow the steps below to bypass garage door opener sensors:
1. Turn Off the Power
First, unplug the garage door from the power source. If you do this, you’ll directly disconnect the sensors.
2. Disengaging Garage Door Sensors
You’ve probably known by now where you can find the garage door sensors. To disengage them, remove the screw by rotating them using a screwdriver. Doing this will detach the sensors from the brackets.
3. Check the Wiring
For this step, you will need a wire cutter to cut the cords by about an inch. This will disconnect the sensors from the garage door. After doing this, you can install the new sensors.
4. Replace the Sensors
When installing a new sensor, locate the metal wiring found inside the cast. Once you find it, strip the wire ends you need to cut. You will then see a black cable and twist it to attach to the wire. Then repeat the process with the white cable.
However, it’s best to ask for help from professionals when doing this step. There are safety precautions you need to consider when doing this task. After all, you might be injuring yourself rather than successfully bypassing the garage door sensors.
Another Option to Bypass a Garage Door Sensor
If you find it too troublesome to disengage the sensors, you can operate the garage door manually. This is probably the easiest way to bypass the garage door sensors.
The reason is you won’t be able to access the sensors anymore. Since you’ve turned off the garage door, you won’t be able to use the opener button any longer. This is a sure step before you wait for the garage door experts to arrive to inspect the sensors.
So, if you’re willing to do this, you can pull the cord from the wall ceiling of your garage door. Doing this will release the door. However, there’s a bit of a problem when opening the garage door – you need to do it by hand.
The only caveat to manually operating the garage door is you might need an extra hand to open it, especially if you’re driving your car outside. After all, you don’t want the door to crash down in your vehicle, which might lead to injury and accident.
Conclusion
Bypassing garage door sensors is not an easy task. You need to get involved with the process so the sensors won’t hinder the operation of your garage door.
It’s also a temporary solution. You only need to do this before waiting for a garage door expert to arrive.
Fortunately, this temporary solution will allow you to use your garage door in the meantime. However, you need to deal with the difficulties of manually operating the garage door on your own.
When it comes to sensors, take care of them. This will prevent you from spending on repairs and replacement. On the other hand, if everything’s too late, you can always ask for help from your trusted garage door expert.
