How Long Does an Electric Gate Motor Last?

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What’s Covered on This Page

• Most Electric Gate Motors Last Between 10 and 15 Years
• Several Factors that Shorten or Extend the Life of your Gate Motor
• Signs Your Gate Motor Is Reaching the End of Its Life
• How long does an electric gate motor typically last?
• Does Hallandale Beach’s coastal climate shorten a gate motor’s lifespan?
• What is the biggest misconception about electric gate motor lifespan?
• When should you call a professional instead of waiting on a gate motor issue?
• Does gate size or weight affect how long the motor lasts?
• Can regular maintenance help a gate motor last longer in Hallandale Beach?

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Most Electric Gate Motors Last Between 10 and 15 Years

That’s the short of it. Generally speaking, a residential electric motor can be expected to operate for a decade to a decade and a half, before its end of life requires it to be replaced entirely. It may live a little longer, or it might not even see eight years. It all depends on its care.

We get that question weekly from Hallandale Beach homeowners: A client is experiencing sluggish performance, a new installation is required, or is it repairable? Our first question is the age. If the unit is less than 10 years old and has been set up and installed properly, it may be repairable. If it is over 12 or 13 years old, it is likely running on borrowed time.

According to the Door and Access Systems Manufacturers Association, most residential gate operator systems have been constructed to provide an expected service life of a 10 year for normal operation. This is generally consistent with our field experiences here in South Florida.

### What “Normal Operation” Means

This is where people are typically confused. A gate motor that is only opening and closing four or five times per day, say, in a single family home will be in very different operating condition than a motor that is cycling the gate 80 times a day, say, for a condominium complex near the Diplomat.

It really depends on the number of openings and closings. The odometer is really what counts. The age of a car does not tell you its real condition. For example, two vehicles that are the same age may not be in the same condition: if the first has 20,000 miles on it, while the second has 200,000. The age of the vehicle does not matter. The number of miles traveled matters, right?

• That a gate on average, six open / close cycles each day translates into about 2,200 cycles per year;
• A multi-unit property with sixty gates open / closed cycles a day is over 21,000 cycles per year!
• Most gate motors have a cycle life rating of between 100,000 and 300,000.
• Salt air and humid coastal conditions like that in Hallandale Beach may accelerate internal corrosion.

A gate motor may only last seven years on a busy commercial property. It may last more than 15 years if it’s on a residential driveway. Remember, the rating is based on average conditions, not necessarily yours.

### Why Life in South Florida Is Tough on Motor Units

Very few people realize that their climate makes an outdoor mechanical system like an electric gate motor suffer and fail much faster. The conditions of heat, salt air and daily rain are conducive to rust and corrosion inside the motor and other metal parts. A gate motor installed in a dry inland climate will almost always outlast the same unit here near the coast.

I have removed electric gate motors from gates that appeared to be 20 years old, but were actually installed less than 9 years ago in neighborhoods close to the Intracoastal. It’s just salt eating away at the connections and corroding. As soon as water enters the control board, things go from bad to worse!

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean you can kiss your electric gate motor goodbye. Instead, you could say that regular maintenance takes even more significance in this situation! A gate motor serviced every year along with proper lubrication and installed in a weatherproof enclosure, can often last 12 to 15 years without too many issues!

But leave your gate motor without service for many years? Then, expect to see the effects of this!

Should your electric gate motor already be aging along with some delays in its movements and some strange noises, it may be worthwhile getting some professional eyes on the unit before it breaks down. The repairmen here at our electric gate repair company can tell you if a repair is worth pursuing or if the motor has reached its expiration date. It’s always better to know ahead of time than to get caught with a gate that refuses to open on a random Monday morning.

Several Factors that Shorten or Extend the Life of your Gate Motor

Not every electric gate motor fails at the same rate, either! Two homes on the same street in Hallandale Beach can have identical motors, yet one lasts 8 years and the other barely hits 5. These variations are typically determined by a small set of circumstances that the average homeowner probably doesn’t ever even think about!

Let’s take a look at what makes that difference:

### Daily Cycle Count

Each time your gate opens and closes, it counts as one cycle! If a residential gate only opens and closes 8 times a day, then that is very different than a condo building gate near Golden Isles that opens and closes 40 to 50 times a day! This is one of the biggest things we see with service calls! A higher daily cycle count can result in much more rapid wear and tear on the gears, bearings, and other electronic components inside the electric gate motor! If your electric gate serves more than one household or apartment complex, your motor is already working overtime even if you didn’t know that!

### Salt Air & Humidity

This is one of the biggest killers for an electric gate motor! Our company does this type of electric gate motor service all around South Florida! Hallandale Beach is a coastal city! Air that is saturated with salt is very corrosive to metal parts, wires, and other components! An electric gate motor that may last 15 years inside a more arid climate could only last you 8 or 10 years if located along a coastal city! We’ve even taken apart units where you didn’t see much corrosion from the outside, but once opened up, the terminals inside were caked in green rust!

Humidity, too, can be very damaging to your motor. Water vapor can penetrate the motor housing slowly degrade the electrical system. This doesn’t become apparent until the gate motor starts to fail.

### Gate Weight and Size

An aluminum swing gate weighs very little and doesn’t have a lot of force to put on your gate motor. A wrought iron sliding gate is another story altogether! The heavier the gate, the more your motor has to work on every cycle! On top of this, if your gate is not well balanced or your track is jam-packed with debris, your gate motor is having to do extra heavy work! We see this on a regular basis with sliding gates on properties along Hallandale Beach Blvd! These gates have sand and other debris that build up in the tracks!

### Installation Quality

A poorly installed electric gate motor can have its life span shortened by many years with little to no warning signs. When arms on a swing motor are out of alignment, this can result in unbalanced torque. If a sliding gate motor is mounted at an incorrect height, this can lead to early grinding between the gears. We have had to replace brand new motors at only 3 years of age, because the original installation was rushed. Good installation isn’t exciting, but is the one thing over which you really do have control.

### Maintenance Frequency

Here’s the problem area that people most often overlook. An electric gate motor requires consistent maintenance to get its expected service life, and that involves simple things like:

• Lubricating the moving parts every 6 months
• Inspecting the electrical connections for corrosion
• Removing any dirt and debris from the tracks or hinges
• Verifying that the safety sensors and automatic reverse mechanisms are in proper working order

If you skip this kind of maintenance for a few years, then a lot of minor problems will add up. A dry bearing can cause friction which leads to heat and burns out a capacitor, leading from a $20 repair into a new electric gate motor. And what we often see with electric gate motors in South Florida is that people wait too long between routine service, so then wonder why their motor stopped working so early.

### Power Surges and Electrical Problems

In South Florida, the storm season can be brutal on electronics. A single lightning strike near your property can send a surge through the line and fry your gate motor’s control board instantly. Even smaller surges from the electrical grid that you might not even be aware of can cause damage over time to the electric gate motor. If your gate motor is not protected by a surge protector, then you’re taking a gamble every year. We recommend using a good quality surge protector on every gate motor installation in Hallandale Beach. Doing this is such a small step that can add years to your motor’s lifespan.

So, of these factors, which would apply to your gate? More than one, I suspect. The good news is that most of those can be controlled with a good installation and good service. If you don’t have a clear sense of which one of these is impacting your motor, then our electric gate repair professionals can look at it and tell you what you’re facing and what you might be up against.

Signs Your Gate Motor Is Reaching the End of Its Life

Most people don’t know that their electric gate motor is dying until it just stops working, which is the worst time to find out, really. But usually, you can tell weeks in advance, if not even months, if your electric gate motor is failing. One of the things we hear quite a bit with our service calls in Hallandale Beach is that the customer’s gate motor just “stopped” working. But then, we’ll look at the motor and see the telltale signs that were starting to present themselves for a while. The list below are some of the signs you should watch for, so you don’t get stuck with a gate that won’t open when you come back home from work, Monday morning, in the Golden Isles.

### Slow or Erratic Movement

The gate should open and close at roughly the same speed. If one time the gate moves slower and the next time it works fine, then something’s wrong. If the electric gate motor is healthy, then its movement will always be consistent and smooth. If the movement is erratic, this means that the internal components are starting to wear out or the motor is heating up or the gears are slipping.

You are leaving work and driving on your driveway near Golden Isles. The gate only moves half-way at first, pauses a second, then continues to open. This happens because the motor is under stress.

### Strange Motor Noise

Grinding, whining or clicking are not good sounds. They could indicate worn out bearings, stripped gears or a motor that is over drawing current. Some sounds are expected on startup. But if the motor is noisy the entire cycle, it’s time to call us.

On the other hand, if the motor has become noticeably less noisy than usual, that too can be a sign of a worn out motor, possibly failing to fully engage when it runs.

### It Keeps Reversing

If you’ve ever had a gate that starts to close then suddenly reverses as though something is in the way, you might have a failed motor. The internal safety mechanisms within the motor detect that resistance that it can no longer overcome and signals the control board to reverse.

Sometimes it could be a sensor problem. If you’re confident the sensor is properly aligned (we can check it for you) and clean, and the gate continues to reverse, that’s a sure sign to get a new motor.

### Frequent Circuit Board Errors

Does your motor continue to error out or blink a code you didn’t see before? The motor’s control board can tell us what’s wrong inside the motor, and we see a lot of boards blinking out on motors that are eight or nine years old in South Florida’s climate.

So here are the tell-tale signs of a bad motor:

• It is longer for the gate to complete a cycle than previously
• Grinding, clicking, or whining during gate operation
• The motor is extremely hot from one cycle
• Your gate responds more slowly to your remote or keypad; i.e. you have to push the remote/button multiple times before the gate moves
• The gate stops during a cycle (opening or closing) and requires a reset of the gate.

So if you’ve started to see two or more of these symptoms, you know it may be the end of the line for the motor. A single symptom is usually fixable; when we begin seeing multiple, a new motor may be the better choice.

For example, a property manager called our team in regards to tenants who said the gate was “being weird.” The gate would open as usual in the morning, but in the afternoon past 2 PM, the gate would just stop and refuse to close. Turns out, the motor was overheating when the afternoon heat set in and the internal thermal protection of the motor kicked in and turned it off. This motor was 11 years old! It was clear that no repair would be able to make up for both the age and heat damage it had suffered.

So please be sure to watch for the warning signs I’ve listed. We’d much rather repair your motor before it fails, leaving you to manually raise and lower your gate. Contact our electric gate repair specialists today, we’d be glad to tell you what’s going on and whether to repair or replace.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about how long does an electric gate motor last? average lifespan explained services in 301 NE 3rd St. unit 206 33009 Hallandale Beach

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