Gate motor service: what gets checked, and how often

A sliding gate motor pushes a heavy steel gate along a track, outdoors, every day, through summer storms and dusty winters. The makers design the motor to need little attention, and some, such as Centurion's Vantage SMART, come with the gearbox filled with oil and need no routine maintenance at all. What wears is everything around it:

• The battery runs the motor on every trip on most home sliders, not only in a power cut, and loses capacity with age.
• The gate's wheels and guide rollers wear, and a gate that drags makes the motor work harder, flattens the battery sooner and trips the collision sensing.
• The rack can work loose or sag onto the pinion as the gate settles.
• Insects, sand and water get into the housing and onto the control card.
• Safety beams drift out of line or get dirty, and a beam that doesn't see a car can't stop the gate.

A service catches these while they're small. Left alone, they become the familiar faults: a gate that beeps, stops halfway or won't move at all.

This is what we go through on a sliding gate service, built from the makers' maintenance sections:

For a swing gate the list changes: the arms, brackets and hinge pins take the wear, and the leaf must swing freely without dropping on its hinges.

Put together, the makers' schedules come to a professional check every six months, with your own simple checks in between. Busy gates need it most: Centurion notes that where a gate works hard, wheels and guide rollers need replacing regularly, so a complex gate wears in months what a house gate wears in years. For an estate or complex, every three months is closer to what the SMART+ schedule describes.

These are the checks the manuals leave to owners, and they need no tools:

• Keep the track clear. Stones, leaves and sand in the track are the commonest reason a gate drags. Centurion suggests gate brooms on the bottom of the gate.
• Cut back plants around the motor and rack: they hide insects and hold damp.
• Run the gate by hand now and then. Release the motor as your manual shows (our guide to opening a gate by hand covers each make), push the gate end to end and feel for drag or catching, then lock it back into gear.
• Wipe the beam lenses and watch the gate stop when you walk through them while it closes.
• Replace remote batteries when the range shortens.

Don't grease the gate or the track. Gemini warns that grease collects dirt and becomes a grinding paste that makes a small problem worse.

Inside the motor is different. Centurion says to isolate the mains and disconnect the battery before any cleaning inside, and checking the charger's fuse means working on mains power: a job for a registered electrician. Leave the housing, the card and the battery wiring to us.

Centurion expects its maintenance-free batteries to last at least three years in normal use. Load-shedding, a dragging gate and a busy household all shorten that. A service tests the battery under load rather than just reading its voltage at rest, because a tired battery can show a healthy voltage and still collapse the moment the motor starts.

How long they last, and what wears them out, is on how long a gate motor battery lasts; replacements are on gate motor batteries.

A gate motor's control card has surge protection built in, but Centurion is clear that it only works if the motor is properly earthed, through the mains earth and an earth spike beside the motor (a copper rod over a metre long, driven into the ground). Spikes corrode and earth wires get cut by gardeners, so a service checks the earth is still connected. It won't make a motor lightning-proof: Centurion says the protection reduces the chance of damage, not that it removes it. What happens when a surge does get through is on gate motor PC board repairs.

Don't wait for the next service if you notice any of these:

• The gate is slower than it was, or struggles near the end of its run.
• It stops partway and reverses with nothing in the way.
• It beeps when you press the remote: see gate motor beeping.
• It works on mains but dies in a power cut: see gate motor battery not charging.
• You hear grinding from the gearbox, or the gate clunks over the same spot on the track.
• It doesn't move at all: start with gate motor not working.

We service sliding and swing gate motors of the makes we work on (Centurion, ET, Gemini, Digidoor, Nice/Hansa and DTS) across Johannesburg, the East Rand and Centurion, and boom gates at estates and businesses. A service covers the checklist above; where something is worn, we tell you what and why before we replace it. For complexes with several gates or booms, tell us how many and how busy they are, and we'll plan the visits around them.

All our spare parts are genuine, and every repair carries our six-month guarantee on our repairs. Your exact price is set in a free quote before any work starts. No call-out fee when we do the work. If no work is done, a R650 call-out fee applies.

If the service shows the motor itself is near the end, repair or replace a gate motor helps you decide, and typical repair costs are on gate motor repair cost.