I bought a chamberlin garage door opener about 2 years ago.  It worked flawlessly and had no issues mechanically with it at all.  Just this past month, I had problems with its garage door sensors.  These garage sensors evidently are automatically “part” of the most modern garage door openers  and there is no way to have the garage door opener work without them being 1) plugged in and 2) aligned properly.

This dilema is extremely frustrating though, if you know that the sensors work, and they appear to be aligned because of the indicator lights, but they STILL don’t allow the garage door to open or close.  That was my predicament.  In order to get the door to close, I’d have to pull the car out, hop out of the car, go inside the garage and hold down the “door close” button until the garage opener completely shut the door on me, and then I would have to exit the side door and walk all the way around the garage to my car.  After about 2 weeks of that, I had enough and tried to find an easy and quick solution.

I searched around online for a while, but from what I could find there were two standard answers.  Those answers consisted of: I needed to either re-align my sensors or purchase new ones.   Now I have no problem purchasing new sensors IF they aren’t working…but my indicator lights on the sensors were both lit so I knew that the sensors were working.  I also followed the directions and made sure that the two indicator lights were lit (one yellow and one green).  This supposedly meant that the sensors could communicate and that nothing was “blocking” the path of sight and therefore was clear to close the door.

However, even though I thought it was ok, what these sensors  weren’t doing properly was sending the signal to each other to allow the door of the garage to open and close freely.  I could only guess that even though the sensors were pointing at each other, for some reason they “saw” something in their path and would not alllow the door to close.   I cleaned the lenses, blew out any dust and realigned these sensors like 2 or 3 times minimum. Uggh.

So  I went back to the internet.  I found a single post that solved my problem. I will warn you though right now, if you have young children or pets that you are worried about ANYONE getting caught if the garage door comes down, don’t do this!!! It defeats the whole purpose of this valuable and important garage door saftey device and that is really what these garage door safety sensors are used for.  Please don’t be careless and mess with the sensors if you have anyone in your family that is susceptible to a garage door closing on them.

Now that I’ve said that, here is what I did and its worked for me perfectly.  I unhooked the sensors from the garage door tracks on each side of the garage.  They are connected with a wing nut and a bracket.  I just unscrewed the wing nut and popped out the sensor.  Then I unravelled all the wiring that was strategically attached to all my garage beams, and studs.  The installer had used simple wire clamps to hold each sensor’s wire neatly.   I did this on both sides of the garage for each sensor.  After having the bundles of wire unravelled I moved it all back underneath the garage door opener itself.  I then neatly wrapped up the wiring into a smaller bundle for each sensor leaving the two sensors dangling along with about 18 inches of slack wire.

After that I took black electrical tape and taped the two garage door sensors nose to nose so that literally no other light or shadows could interfere with the sensors communicating with each other.  Thats’ it!  So simple and yet something that I wouldn’t have even thought of if I hadn’t found that helpful tip.   You can see a picture that I crudely snapped with my phone of the finished product.

Once the two sensors were securely taped together, I hung them up on a couple of nails and tested everything out.  It all worked perfectly.  Now again, let me just say this.  I don’t recommend doing this if you have any children under the age of 14.  And I’m making a grand assumption that your pets are smart and able to move out of the way if the door comes down.   If you want to do things the safest way, do an online search or visit an online site that sells garage door sensors.  They usually can ship them out in a day or two and are much cheaper than buying them directly from a garage door installation company.