How to Disable Garage Door Sensors

hey everyone welcome back bruce here with diy homestead projects in this video i'm going to show you how to bypass your garage door sensors just right up front as a warning to let you know if you don't like this idea then don't do it a lot of you may not even have any need to do anything like this but i'm going to try to explain to you what my situation is what the problem was and why i chose to do what i'm about to show you so basically the problem is when we moved into this house a year ago we had problems with this garage door and with the sensors sometimes it won't go down and the door stops and the light blinks on the uh on the overhead motor unit and that's an indication that there's a problem with the two sensors that are at the bottom of the doorway on each side so that creates a beam across there and then if the door is in transit coming down something walks in crawls in rolls in in the way of the door it'll trip that beam and that'll tell the opener to reverse the direction and go back up there can be several problems if you're having that issue you might need new sensors the sensors might just need an adjustment or it could be you know other problems within the unit itself it could be several things but in my case my sensors are in in perfect operating order they were in adjustment i went through several times and adjusted them because i thought that's what the problem was but let me change the view of the camera and i'll show you down here where my sensor was mounted and i'll show you what the problem was with my situation so you can see this bracket is where my sensors were mounted one on the each side of the door oh 10 or 12 inches from the floor and they have a wire that goes into the wall right behind the sensor and then that's wired in and it goes back up to the unit so what happened is with these brackets right on the rail like a lot of them are mounted my house door faces south so i get the daytime sun comes in and it'll hit these sensors and cause it to not be able to read the signal coming from the other sensor one is ascending and one is a receiving the only way i could really remedy this would be to move these sensors back away from the door back into this cavity beside the garage door so that the sun no matter what angle it comes through the doorway it's not going to hit that sensor and that's that's an option but as you can see i store a bunch of just stuff here by the door if i moved this sensor back in there then it would really be prone to a couple of problems it would be easily blocked by having something in here it could get broken or damaged from putting things in there and i just really just didn't want to do that we don't have any children at this house my wife and i are the only ones living here both adults we don't have kids coming and going from this place so i'm not worried about not having these sensors and that's why i'm going to bypass them that may not be your situation and you may not agree with that but that's the situation we're in now the door does still have a safety feature which is the strength in which it closes if there is something in the way and it comes down and hits it once it builds up enough resistance the door will reverse so that feature is still in effect it's just i don't have a beam across here to tell the door not to go down so let me set up on the ladder and i'll go up there and show you on the machine how i set this up before i climb up on the ladder i just wanted to show you this this is uh where the wire comes out of the wall right by the mount for the sensor and all i've done is i've cut that wire off i left five inches of wire on the sensor and then i have all that wire there so if and when the time comes that i'm going to reinstall them in this position all i have to do is connect those two wires and uh it'll be set back up the way it was before all right now we're looking at the back of my garage door opener and mine is a lift master made by chamberlain half horsepower this little section right here is where the garage openers and sensors are located the left side is it's two wires a red and white the red is in the red and the white is in the white that is for my opening button that's on the wall inside the garage the other two gray or black and white are for the sensors so there's actually two wires come out of the ceiling and go to the right hand side the gray and the white and those go to each one of the sensors so there's four wires two for each sensor i still have them connected even though i don't have sensors down there i just left the wires there because they're inside the walls all i did was i took two wires and put one in each side one is marked with some type of black black stripe and the other one is solid white so i put the solid white in the white outlet and then the one with the black stripe on it is in the other side with the black just made a pigtail of two wires coming down and then here is a joint coming from one of the sensors is connected to that and then the other sensor is connected to this one here are my sensors i've got a solid green light and an amber light and which is exactly how they should be whether they're mounted like this or they're mounted on the wall and i just put the eyes together and taped them with electrical tape so they're always sensing each other with no obstructions in between that will allow the opener to work without actually having the sensors mounted where they're intended to be mounted and then i just took this the sensors and i just tucked them up above so they just kind of hang out up there now my garage door works perfectly i just don't have the safety of the sensor beam to prevent it if something walks through there or rolls through there or is in the way of the door at the bottom and all i have to do is take these two wires out undo these connections i just have electrical tape on there to keep those wires from shorting out untape the sensors and then mount them back down where they used to go and i'll be back to uh to the normal operation if that's what i need to do say for instance if i move or something so i did up a little quick sketch here with a pencil for those of you who are interested and maybe you have questions about the wiring let me explain it to you and then you can pause it and look at it again if you need to so i've got these four blocks up here four locations for wires this block is red this block is white this block is white and this block is gray or black the red and the white one wire out of each goes through the wall to my door button that's mounted on the wall inside wall of the garage so forget about those you don't need to worry about them the white and the black or gray also has a hole for wires in it now these are where my wires are connected there was two white wires and two white wires with black stripes the ones with the black stripe goes in the black spot or the gray the solid whites go into the solid white now you can either pull those wires out and put these two pigtails in or i just twist them together and stuck them back in there either way is fine but you need one solid white and one white with some type of mark on it a black line or black striping or something one of each coming out and then you have each sensor of course those are taped together they each have two wires one is a black striped wire and the other is a solid white so take the solid white from this sensor and a solid white from this sensor and connect those both to the solid white wire that's in the white block the wire that has the black stripe on it there will be one out of each sensor connect them together with the wire that goes into the black or the gray box on your opener and then just put them wherever you want tape them hook them up on top of your garage door opener or whatever just so that i only needed about a foot of of wire to come out of that down here long enough to hook my sensors to it and your door button will work properly and your door will operate you just won't have keep in mind remember potential safety concern you're not going to have any sensors for something that actually gets in the pathway of the door as it comes down anyway i wanted to show you guys that maybe that'll help somebody out there like i said if if you don't if you're not comfortable with that you you want those sensors you don't want to operate your door without the sensors because you have kids or whatever the situation or something whatever your situation is then certainly don't don't do this modification but for some people it'll be a good fix if they're in the situation i am with the with the sunlight hitting those beams now you could take toilet paper rolls i've seen all kinds of videos showing how to keep the build a little hood or a shield over the sensor so it can still see the other sensor but the sun won't block the sensor won't hit the uh hit the lens of it lots of different ways to go about it this is just the way i chose to do it hope you guys enjoyed the video hope it helps somebody out there and if you do choose to do it just remember it's your responsibility i'm not going to take responsibility for your actions you guys can make those decisions for yourself hope you have a great day and we'll see on the next video you

Channel: DIY Homestead Projects

Views: 394,186

Keywords: How to Disable Garage Door Sensors, how to disable garage door sensors liftmaster, how to disable garage door safety sensors, how to disable garage door sensors chamberlain, disable garage door safety sensor, disable garage door opener sensor, garage door sensor, garage door safety sensor bypass, garage door safety sensor installation, garage door repair, garage door won't close, garage door safety sensor alignment, garage door safety sensor, diy homestead projects, safety sensor

Id: AUqKwAULbYY

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020