Electric Gate Will Not Close: Common Causes

Photocells and safety beams

A pair of photocells sits across the opening. One sends an infrared beam, the other receives it. Break the beam and the gate will not close. Spiders build webs across them, low sun dazzles them, a wheelie bin sits in front of one, or the lens fogs up after a wet winter.

Wiping both lenses clean with a dry cloth and clearing anything in the beam path resolves a genuine share of no close faults, and it costs nothing to try.

• Clean both lenses, sender and receiver, not just the obvious one
• Check nothing has been parked, planted or leant in the beam path
• Look for a status light on the units, though the meaning varies by manufacturer

Obstacle sensing and force settings

Automated gates monitor how hard the motor is working. If closing suddenly needs more effort than the controller expects, it reads that as an obstruction and reverses. Anything that adds drag to the closing direction can trigger it: a dropped hinge, a stiff bearing, gravel built up in the run, or a ground track full of grit.

This is why gate automation faults and gate hanging faults overlap so often. The motor is fine, the gate has simply become harder to move than it was when the system was set up.

Hinge drag and mechanical wear

A gate that a person would describe as slightly stiff is a gate an automated system may refuse to close. Worn hinges, a racked leaf, a leaning pier or a sliding gate rolling on a worn wheel all increase resistance progressively, so the fault appears gradually rather than overnight.

A useful test is to disengage the operator, if the manual release is documented for your system, and swing the gate by hand. A gate that is heavy or catches by hand will never close reliably under power.

• Swing by hand where a manual release exists: it should move smoothly through the whole arc
• Sliding gates: check the track for grit, standing water and worn rollers
• Swing gates: check for a dropped leading edge, which loads the closing action

Power, batteries and control faults

Backup batteries in a control panel age out and can leave a system running in a limited mode. Control boards suffer water ingress in exposed housings. Loose terminals corrode. Keypads and intercoms sometimes send a command the panel reads only partially.

None of that is homeowner territory. Mains powered gate control panels should only be opened by someone competent with the supply isolated, and a heavy automated gate has enough stored energy to hurt someone during testing.

What is safe to check and what is not

Safe: cleaning photocell lenses, clearing the swing or slide path, sweeping the track, checking your remote or keypad batteries, and confirming the gate is not simply on a hold open setting that someone has activated.

Not safe: opening the control panel, altering force or travel settings, defeating a safety beam to make the gate close, or working near the mechanism while the power is live. Overriding a safety device to stop the nuisance removes exactly the protection that stops a gate closing on a child.

• Never bypass a safety beam to get the gate closing again
• Never adjust force settings to overcome a mechanical drag problem
• Do isolate nothing yourself unless you are competent to do so safely

Getting an automated gate looked at

We work on automated and commercial gates across London and Hertfordshire, and a good share of no close faults turn out to be mechanical rather than electronic, which is the part we handle directly. Where the gate is dragging, out of square, or hanging off a pier that has moved, that is the fault to correct first.

Ring 07885907880 with the make of the system if you know it, and a description of what the gate does and when it started, and we will arrange to see it.

Frequently asked

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