Garage door photoelectric sensors, also called “photo eyes” are the small black boxes you see mounted on the door track that usually have a round glass lens like a camera lens on them. They are mounted towards the base of the garage door track near the garage floor (or, at least they should be mounted there). These sensors are designed as a safety feature to sense when a person or object is in the way of the overhead garage door as it is closing. When a person or object trips the sensor it sends a signal to the garage door motor telling it to stop and reverse back up.

There are a few installation errors I come across on these. The first is that the sensors are mounted directly together up above the garage door motor instead of down on the door track  to each side of the garage door where they should be. Homeowners like to do this because either: 1) spider webs and other objects don’t cause the door to reverse when closing or 2) because the sensors are messed up and they can’t get them properly aligned if mounted on the tracks so they give up and go the easy route of mounting them directly to each other.

The second installation error I commonly see is that the sensors are mounted too high off the floor. Once they get mounted higher than 6″ off the floor they become useless in protecting what they were meant to protect like small children or pets. The photo below shows a set I came across at an inspection that were 22 inches off the floor. That’s a no-no!

Either way it’s a poor excuse to render them useless by not having them mounted where they should be. It is a life safety issue. My tip for you in this article is to check your photoelectric garage door sensors and make sure they are mounted 6″ above the floor. Any higher and they won’t protect kids or pets, any lower and it may cause nuisance tripping from objects like leaves.

Below is a standards document for mounting photoelectric sensors for garage doors.

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