Gate Motor Repairs
Gate stuck open, stuck shut, or dead since the last outage. Call 079 106 5911 or WhatsApp us.
Almost every gate motor call in Boksburg is one of about seven faults, and the symptom usually tells you which before anyone opens the cover. It is worth reading this before you phone, because describing the behaviour accurately is the difference between arriving with the right part and arriving twice.
Supply, isolator or the board itself. Check that the plug point still has power before assuming the worst — a tripped earth leakage is a five-second fix and costs you nothing.
The backup battery, nine times out of ten. This is the single most common gate fault in South Africa and it is covered further down.
Mechanical rather than electrical. Gearbox, clutch or a stripped drive gear. The motor is trying; something between it and the gate is not passing the effort along.
Limit settings lost, or the obstruction sensing is triggering. Limits commonly wander after a power interruption or a battery swap.
Rack teeth, wheels or alignment. Left alone this chews through a gearbox that costs considerably more than the rack did.
Receiver or aerial rather than the remote. If every remote in the house lost range at the same time, it is not the remotes.
The units on most Boksburg properties are the common South African brands — Centurion and Gemini turn up most often, with ET and Hansa behind them. Which one you have matters mainly for parts availability, and that is worth knowing before spending money on a repair.
A gate motor battery is a standby battery. It was designed to sit fully charged and be called on rarely — a power failure now and then, a few cycles a year. Years of scheduled outages ask it to do something completely different: discharge and recharge two or three times a day, every day.
Batteries do not last under that. A cell rated for several years of standby duty can be finished inside one, and the failure is gradual rather than sudden. The gate keeps working perfectly on mains while the battery quietly loses the capacity to run it, so nothing seems wrong until the power goes out and the gate will not move.
The tell is specific: normal operation with the power on, nothing at all with the power off. If that is your gate, the motor is almost certainly fine and the battery is not. It is also the cheapest gate fault there is, which is why it is worth checking before agreeing to anything larger.
Worth knowing too: an ageing battery drags the rest of the system down. A cell that can no longer hold charge makes the charging circuit work continuously, and that is a slow way to damage a board that had nothing wrong with it.
Control boards rarely die during an outage. They die at the moment supply is restored, when the spike that comes with it reaches a board that has no protection in front of it. That is why gate motors so often fail within minutes of the lights coming back on, and why a whole street can lose gates on the same evening.
A surge-damaged board usually announces itself — a burnt smell, visible scorching, or a unit that is completely unresponsive with supply confirmed present. Sometimes it is subtler: the gate runs but the limits will not hold, or the receiver has gone and the motor has not.
Surge protection on the gate supply costs a fraction of a control board. If your board has already been replaced once, fitting protection at the same time as the second one is the obvious decision.
We publish rand ranges for lock work on the price guide because those jobs are predictable. Gate motors are not, and quoting a figure before seeing the fault would mean either padding it or revising it upwards at your gate. Neither is how this works.
What is fixed is the call-out, which sits in the same published R350 to R750 band as everything else and is told to you before anyone drives out. What varies is what is wrong:
The cheapest outcome by a wide margin, and the most common one. Frequently the entire job.
Considerably more, and the point at which repair versus replacement becomes a real question rather than a formality.
Depends heavily on the unit and whether parts are still made for it. Diagnosed first, quoted second.
The commitment is simply this: the fault is diagnosed and the price given before anything is fitted, and if the sensible answer is that the repair is not worth it, you will be told that instead of sold a part.
Not every gate motor deserves to be saved, and pretending otherwise costs people more than it saves them. There are three fairly clear cases where a replacement is the better spend.
The board is obsolete. Older units reach a point where boards are no longer manufactured and the only parts available are salvaged from other dead motors. A repair like that buys uncertain time at real cost.
It has failed repeatedly. A motor on its third fault in two years is telling you something. At that point the running total has usually passed what a new unit would have cost.
The mechanicals are worn through. When the gearbox, rack and wheels have all gone together, the motor is not really being repaired any more — it is being rebuilt piece by piece at retail prices.
Everything else is worth fixing, and most gates that get quoted for replacement in this market do not need one.
A large share of gate calls are not motor faults at all. Remotes get lost, batteries die, and a family ends up sharing one working fob that travels with whoever is out. Spares are cut and paired on site, so everyone has their own again in one visit.
If a remote has been lost rather than broken, say so. A lost remote still opens your gate for whoever has it, and clearing it from the receiver matters more than replacing it does — the same reasoning as rekeying a house after keys go missing.
Access fobs for a complex or estate are a different matter. Those are usually controlled by the body corporate or managing agent, and the request has to go through them rather than through us.
Searches for gate motor repairs near me and gate motor repairs Boksburg tend to come from one of two very different situations, and they do not want the same answer.
If the gate has trapped you or left the property open — stuck shut with a car inside, or stuck open overnight — that is an emergency and the number is answered at any hour. Manual release gets the gate moving and the property secured, and the repair itself follows.
If the gate simply stopped working and nothing is trapped or exposed, book it in daylight. Diagnosis is better done in the light, parts are easier to source in trading hours, and you avoid the after-hours premium for a job that was never urgent. It is the same advice as the price guide gives on lock work: if it can wait until morning, let it.
What the gate does, and whether it does it on mains, on battery, or both. That one detail decides what comes on the van.
The motor housing on WhatsApp identifies the make and model faster than any description, and parts follow from that.
Once we know the unit and the symptom, you get a realistic time and a realistic cost. 079 106 5911.
Gate motor repairs across Boksburg. Diagnosed before it is quoted, and told to you straight if the repair is not worth doing.