Guide

Garage door won't close? First decide: refusing, or failing

Updated August 20, 2026

Closing is the only direction a garage door opener is allowed to say no to. Going up, it pulls until it can’t. Coming down, three separate safety systems can each veto the trip, because a closing door is the one that can land on a person, a pet, or a bumper. So before anything else, figure out which kind of problem you have: a door being refused, or a door that genuinely can’t get there.

The tell is how it quits. A refused door reverses smartly and completely, often with the opener lights flashing, and the door itself moves freely the whole way. A failing door struggles: it grinds, drags, sits crooked, or stops partway and stays there. Refusals are usually cheap. Failures usually aren’t a button-press away.

The three vetoes

The sensor veto. If the door starts down and immediately returns, or won’t start down at all while the opener lights flash, the photo-eyes by the floor are objecting. Most of the time the objection is honest but mistaken: a lens fogged with dust, a bracket someone’s boot nudged out of aim, a snow shovel leaning into the beam. We wrote a separate guide to reading the sensor lights, because the two LEDs tell you exactly what’s wrong. Cost of the usual fix: zero.

The force veto. The opener measures how hard it’s pushing. If the door meets more resistance than the setting allows, the opener assumes it hit something and reverses. When the “something” is a basketball, fine. When it’s a track gone slightly out of square or rollers that seized up over winter, the opener reverses every single trip and the real problem is mechanical wear pretending to be an obstruction. Turning the force up without finding the drag is how safety systems get quietly disabled, and we won’t do it.

The limit veto. The opener has a setting for where “fully closed” is. If that setting has drifted, the opener touches the slab, believes it hit an obstruction, and pops back up. The clue: the door reverses only in the last few inches of travel. This one is a five-minute adjustment on most LiftMaster, Chamberlain, and Genie units.

The real blocks

If the door quits partway and stays, or comes down crooked, no veto is involved. Something structural gave up:

• A snapped or frayed cable lets one side of the door drop faster than the other. The door racks sideways and binds in the track.
• A broken spring makes the door too heavy for the opener to control on the way down. Often you’ll have heard the bang when it went.
• A bent track or a roller out of its groove stops the door cold at the same spot every time.

All three are stop-using-it problems. Pull nothing, force nothing, and keep the family away from a crooked door in particular. It’s resting at a bad angle on parts not designed to hold it.

A test that settles it

With the door fully closed later (or with someone steadying it), pull the red release cord and lift the door a couple of feet by hand. A door that’s mechanically fine lifts smoothly and stays where you leave it. If it lifts that easily, everything on the failure list above is unlikely, and your problem lives in the veto list. If it’s heavy, gritty, or crooked, the opener was never the problem.

What this costs in Kearney

Sensor cleaning and re-aiming you can do free, today. Limit and force adjustments come with any service visit, and are included in a $75-$150 tune-up if the door needs a general going-over anyway. Cables run modest money; springs and track work are the expensive end, and both are quoted firm before work starts.

When you call, say which pattern you saw: “reverses right away with flashing lights,” “reverses in the last few inches,” or “stops crooked halfway.” Those three sentences are three different repairs, and knowing which one saves you a diagnostic step.