Automatic gate repair · Plano, TX
Automatic Gate Repair in Plano, TX
You tend to find out on the way out, already late. We do automatic gate repair across Plano.
The structure, the hardware bearing it, the operator that drives it. Motors and control boards. Hinges, tracks and rollers. Welding on site where the frame is what has given way. Sliding or swing, at a single driveway or at the entrance to a development. Estimates cost nothing.
Free estimates · Plano, TX
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Tell us what the gate is doing and where it is.
The work
What we repair on Plano gates
Below: what we work on. Why the age of a Plano neighborhood shows up at its gates. And what the city has set out for gates that cross a fire lane.
The load-bearing parts
Posts, hinges, tracks, rollers — the pieces that absorb the weight of the gate every single time it travels. Dragging and binding are how they announce themselves, and both are worth investigating early rather than late. Those parts get repaired or replaced, and where a post or the frame has actually failed, we weld it where it stands.
What drives it and what decides
Motors and control boards. A gate that travels open and then refuses to shut, or shuts without ever latching, points at one or the other. Telling them apart is most of the job. We repair and replace both. Gate opener repair explains how those two failures diverge.
The entry side
Keypads, card readers, telephone entry, intercom — installed and repaired, at a single driveway or at the entrance to a whole development. Access control deals with that equipment in depth.
None of which depends on how old the gate is. What it needs is a question about this gate, today. The full account is on the automatic gate repair page.
How Plano was built
Plano's gates were not all built in the same decade
Plano did not go up all at once, and it did not go up evenly.
East and central Plano were largely developed through the 1970s and 80s. Big trees now, larger lots, streets that have settled into themselves. Whiffletree, just east of Legacy Drive, runs from the late 1980s into the early 90s. Go west and the dates move: Legacy and Willow Bend are newer, and Legacy West is newer still. It broke ground in 2014 and opened in June 2017, with more than 1,300 residential units in it.
So one city, and something like thirty years between one end of it and the other.
Here is what that means at a gate.
Set a system fitted in 1985 beside one fitted in 2018. Opposite ends of a service life. Different wear, arriving at different times, for different reasons.
That is a general truth anywhere. What makes it a Plano question is volume. The city holds a great deal of both, sometimes within a few minutes’ drive of each other.
Older is not worse. It is different.
A difference in service profile, not a difference in quality. Older, and it has been cycling for longer, and the parts that take the load have been taking it since the Reagan administration. A newer system has different habits, not fewer.
One thing the decade of a neighborhood does not tell you is the age of any particular gate. A house from 1985 may have had a gate put in last spring. The only way to know what is in front of you is to look at it.
What the city has set out
What Plano has set out for gates across a fire lane
Plano publishes its own guidelines for gates across fire department access roads. The version the city makes available is dated January 2015. It is written against the 2012 International Fire Code and local amendments.
So read what follows as what that document sets out. Not as a statement of today’s code.
It starts with one line that does a lot of work. “Knox is the only approved key access system for the City of Plano.” Not one of the approved systems. The only one. The guidelines describe that system as covering Knox key boxes, Knox padlocks and Knox key switches.
What is less widely known is that the document does not treat every gate the same. It splits them.
- Residential
For gated residential occupancies, it sets out that “Opticom compatible receivers are the only approved automated entry system for gated residential access gates.” The gate control, it says, “shall be operable by an approved Knox key switch located on the entrance side of the gate.”
- Everything else
The electrical requirements track the residential ones. But manually operated gates and barriers instead call for “a City of Plano approved Knox padlock system.”
Both sides of that split share one idea. If the power goes, the gate opens.
In the guidelines’ words: “in the event of a power failure, the gate shall automatically be transferred to a fail-safe mode allowing the gate to be pushed open without the use of special knowledge or equipment.”
To be clear about what we do here
None of that is our work. We do not supply, install, service, program, certify or order Knox or Opticom hardware. We do not file permits, verify compliance, perform inspections, or coordinate with the Fire Marshal’s Office. And we cannot tell you from here which of these applies to your gate, or whether the city has revised any of it since 2015. The City of Plano is the authority on what a specific property needs, and the Fire Marshal’s Office is who to ask.
Who the gate belongs to
HOA, community and commercial gates
Driveway gates at a single house
One gate, one household, and someone who noticed that it sounds different this week than it did last week.
Community and association entrances
Shared property, which means the repair has an approval path attached to it. Who signs off is a separate matter from what has actually broken, and only the first of those varies by community.
Commercial premises
Offices, industrial sites, anywhere the gate is the first thing that has to work in the morning.
Association and commercial work is set out on the commercial gate repair page.
Questions
Common questions about gate repair in Plano
What does Plano set out for a gate across a fire lane?
The city's January 2015 guidelines state that “Knox is the only approved key access system for the City of Plano.” They address gated residential occupancies separately from other occupancies. Requirements change, so confirm with the Fire Marshal's Office.
Do you service all of Plano?
Yes. Plano is one of the eleven cities we work in, listed in full on the service areas page.
Next step
Free estimates
Estimates cost nothing, on a gate fitted last year or one fitted thirty years ago. Describe what it has started doing and we will come and see it.
Reach us on {{PHONE_NUMBER}}, or put the details in the form and we will come back to you.
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- Over a decade in business