Is your garage door opener safe? The Door & Access Systems Manufacturers Association (DASMA) has a great technical data sheet giving instructions on how to conduct a comprehensive 10-point inspection of your overhead garage door and garage door opener, which can be downloaded here: Garage Door Safety Checklist. When inspecting garage doors and garage door openers, I use a modified version of that checklist. Rather than re-write this 10-point checklist, I'm going to go over the most common garage door opener issues that come up during home inspections.
Photoelectric Eyes Installed Too High
The photoelectric eyes for garage door openers need to be installed within 6" of the ground. If they're installed higher than this, there's an increased potential for a small animal or possibly a child to end up below the pathway of the photoelectric sensors.

Not only that, but when these sensors are installed too high in the air, it's impossible to hit the garage door opener button, run out of the garage, and jump over the beam while the door is closing. I'm only half-kidding. What do you think the owners did with the garage shown below? I have to assume they dove under the beam and did a barrel roll while the door closed behind them.

While these sensors should never be installed at the ceiling, it does happen. A lot. Here's a fun compilation of photos showing these sensors improperly installed, on purpose.






















Old garage door openers which pre-date photoelectric sensors
Garage door openers

that are more than 25 years old typically won't have photoelectric sensors installed. These garage door openers should still auto-reverse if they hit an object that obstructs their path while closing, but the only way to know if that feature is functional is to do a live test. The industry standard test is to let the garage door opener close on a flat 2x4. If the opener auto-reverses when it hits the 2x4, it passes the test. If it doesn't, it fails the test and should be adjusted or replaced for safety.
I've performed this test hundreds of times without incident, but I've heard numerous stories from other home inspectors who ended up breaking the garage door opener while doing this test. Just about a month ago, that happened to one of the inspectors in my company. After that incident, we had a company meeting about this and agreed to stop performing this test on these old, frail garage door openers. When a garage door opener is so old that it's not equipped with photoelectric sensors, we simply recommend replacement of the opener.
This test is actually supposed to be conducted on all garage door openers every month by homeowners, so we've started including this advice in all of our home inspection reports.