Protecting your car, motorcycle, front or rear-wheel drive self-propelled lawn mower, and other appliances from the elements is crucial for their longevity. This is where garages come in, which have become more user-friendly than ever before. In many cases, you don’t even have to muster the strength to open and close garage doors themselves. With the press of a button, they can open and close at your leisure with the appropriate horsepower for your needs. Many are also now equipped with lights, illuminating your garage while telling you some important information about your door and its ability to function.
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A common sight on a garage door opener light is for it to maintain a steady blink, likely without any movement from the door itself. Best case scenario, this is merely an indicator that your garage door’s locking mechanism is engaged. To remedy this, all you need to do is disengage the lock via the door’s connected wall panel, as can be done with even the best-rated Wi-Fi-connected garage door openers. This is often done by holding down the lock button on the wall panel for around two seconds, thus releasing the lock and ending the blinking light. In some cases, though, there could be more to the story. In the event checking up on your garage door lock doesn’t end the light blinking, you’re not out of luck. There are other elements to investigate before checking in with a professional.
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An engaged lock isn’t the only potential cause of a blinking garage door light
If you find that the lock on your garage door isn’t engaged, yet the opener light continues to blink, there are other things to check. If your garage door is open, the safety sensors, which are found at the bottom of the garage door tracks and prevent the door from closing when there are objects beneath, could be the culprits. It could be that they just need to be wiped off with a cloth to return to working order, or they need to be manually realigned. To do this, simply measure from the ground to the sensor to ensure they’re both the same height, unscrew them from their mounts, move them up or down as needed, and reattach them.
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Should the sensors not be the reason for the continued blinking, a more complicated cause could be to blame. It’s entirely possible that these lights are warning you that there’s a wiring issue somewhere in your garage door system. This can be a multitude of things, including a wiring short out, it simply wearing out due to age, or not being installed correctly in the first place. Unless you’re knowledgeable on electrical work and how garage doors function, you’re best off calling in a garage door professional to diagnose the issue. If the problem is wiring-related or something else, they’ll have the know-how to put the inconvenience to bed.
Garage door issue troubleshooting can take time, and professionals aren’t always available immediately. So, you might have to make do with using your garage door manually until the issue and the blinking lights it triggers are resolved.
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When all else fails, enabling your garage door’s manual mode can do the job
Like any electronic system, garage door technology can be finicky, even with lights to let us know there’s a problem. It can take time to figure out what’s really wrong, especially if there’s more to it than the aforementioned quick fixes, like releasing the lock and cleaning or moving the sensors. In the meantime, your car isn’t trapped in your garage, nor is the door impossible to open or close. The vast majority of automatic garage doors can be operated manually, and it doesn’t take much to access this handy functionality.
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- Locate the manual release cord. This detaches the door from the trolley used for the automatic open and close mechanism so you can move it freely.
- Pull the release cord. You can now lift the door and slide it to whichever position you desire.
- Once done, bring the door back down to the ground.
- To resume automatic open and close functions, pull on the release cord again toward the door so it can reengage.
- Either push the door up or, if possible, use the opener buttons to send the trolley back into the opener carriage. They’ll click into place.
If your garage door is stuck open and needs to be manually closed, take extreme caution before pulling the release cord. Garage doors are heavy, and dropping them can result in serious damage to the door or people and objects underneath. Having someone else around to help carefully guide it down once the cord is pulled can prevent both. Ideally, you won’t have to do much manual operation before someone can come in and figure out what operation issues and blinking light anomalies are plaguing your garage.
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