About Adrenalinemob

Two Small Housings by the Floor

Adrenalinemob repairs garage doors in Huntington Beach, out of a shop on Garfield Ave in the 92649 ZIP. We do the ordinary work, springs and rollers and openers, but the reason this business exists in the shape it does is the pair of photo eyes near the bottom of your door tracks.

Every residential opener sold in this country since 1993 has been built to UL 325, and that standard is unusually clear about those sensors. The beam has to sit no higher than six inches off the floor. Not roughly. Not thereabouts. Six inches, because that is the height at which a child, a pet or a foot actually occupies the doorway.

Why We Ended Up Specialising

We started measuring the height on every job, out of curiosity more than anything. It turned out to be wrong often enough that it stopped being a curiosity. Brackets slide down a track and get pushed back up to a comfortable working height by somebody who did not know the height mattered. Installers set them high to clear a stored kayak or a stack of paving slabs and never came back to lower them. On rentals they get knocked loose and re-fitted wherever the screw holes happened to line up.

An eye at knee height is not broken. It works. It reverses the door reliably in a demonstration, and it will pass any check that consists of waving an arm through the doorway. What it no longer does is watch the part of the opening where somebody would be lying down.

The Ones We Take Personally

Then there are the defeated ones. Tape across a lens. Both housings unbolted and set on a shelf facing each other, so the beam is permanently made and the opener believes the doorway is clear at all times. Terminals bridged with a twist of wire at the opener head, which is the worst of them, because from the ground the sensors look perfectly normal and are doing nothing at all.

Not one of those was done out of carelessness. They were all done by someone whose door kept reversing for no reason they could see, who got tired of it, and who solved the annoyance rather than the fault. The fault is usually a pinched wire, a knocked bracket, afternoon sun on the receiver or a track that is binding, and it is nearly always an hour of work.

The Other Half of the Job

The photo eyes stop a door before it touches you. The force limit reverses it after it has. They are separate protections and a door can pass one while failing the other, which is why we lay a 2x4 flat under every door we visit and watch what happens when it lands.

We also fit opener battery backup, which California has required on units sold or installed here since 1 July 2019, after people were left unable to get a car out of an attached garage during power cuts in wildfire evacuations.

Call (714) 814-3638 or find us at 9560 Garfield Ave, Huntington Beach, CA 92649.