Gate Repair across NYC.

Gate Repair in NYC — Plain English

A driveway gate in the city is a garage door turned on its side and left out in the weather, on a lot where nothing has room to spare. Brooklyn and Queens driveways are narrow, so most gates here slide on a ground track behind a brick pier rather than swing. Staten Island, Long Island and Westchester have the room for swing gates on linear arms. Both kinds carry an operator, a control board, a power supply, at least two safety devices and a set of controls, and any one of those is a service call.

What actually fails

• The gate itself. A slider that drags on a bent track or a flat roller, a swing gate that has dropped on its hinge and rubs the driveway. The motor gets blamed; the gate is the cause. We fix the gate first or the new motor lasts a season.
• Control board. Surges on the line, lightning, and ten summers inside a closed housing. Power in and nothing out is a board, and for the common makes it rides on the truck.
• Photo eyes and safety edges. The device that stops the gate closing on a car or a child also stops it closing for a spider web, low sun, or a wire a snow shovel found. Half of the "opens but will not close" calls end here. We repair the device; we never bypass one.
• Battery, transformer, solar. A gate that works in the morning and quits by evening is a battery. A dead gate with a live breaker is usually the transformer or the low-voltage run out to the post.
• Chains, arms and racks. Slack chain skipping the sprocket, a rack that has come loose from the bottom rail, an arm bracket that has pulled off a hollow gate frame. Salt and freeze-thaw do most of it.
• Receivers, keypads and intercoms. Range on the remote down to a car length, a keypad drowned by a winter, a phone entry that stopped dialing when the line changed. Quick, and we re-code every remote in the house before we go.

Gates and the New York year

Road salt gets into every hinge, track and roller on a driveway gate by February, and freeze-thaw lifts ground tracks and cracks the loop wire buried in the slab. Summer heat cooks capacitors and batteries in a housing that faces the sun all afternoon. Storms take boards. We see the same faults in the same months across the five boroughs and the island, and the truck is stocked for the season we are in.

How the visit goes

Power first, with a meter, at the transformer or the battery and along the low-voltage run. Then the board, its inputs and outputs and limits. Then the safety devices, one at a time, until the one holding the gate open shows itself. Then the drive: capacitor, motor, gearbox, chain, arm, and whether the gate moves freely by hand with the operator released. Last, every remote, the keypad and the intercom, working before the paperwork. Most gate calls finish on the first visit because the parts for the common makes are on the truck.

Repair the operator or replace it

A board, a battery, a capacitor, a photo eye or a receiver is a repair, and that is most calls. A new operator is the honest answer when the gearbox is worn out on a make nobody supplies boards for, when the unit was too small for the gate from the start, or when the housing has been flooding for years and the electronics are green inside. You hear which one on the driveway, not on the phone, and the free estimate covers both.

We work on automatic metal gates: steel, iron and aluminum, swing and slide, residential and light commercial. Whatever the fault, the gate has to move freely by hand before any motor goes in.