When It Stops Being a DIY Job
Nudging a sensor bracket back into place with your hand is fine the first time. If you're doing it every few weeks, the bracket itself has a problem a quick nudge won't fix. In a lot of McHenry garages, especially the ones built during the 1980s and 90s run that makes up most of the local stock, the sensor brackets were screwed straight into wood jamb trim rather than the concrete or masonry opening. Wood trim moves with humidity and temperature a lot more than concrete does, and after three decades of that movement the screw holes widen and the bracket starts riding loose in its slot. At that point you're not aligning a sensor, you're trying to align a bracket that has nothing solid to hold it. If you've already re-set the eyes twice this winter and they're drifting again, that's the point to call someone rather than keep adjusting - the fix is a new mounting point, not another tweak.
What Local Conditions Do
McHenry sits in a cold climate band with severe winter swings, and that matters more for sensor alignment than most people expect. The sensors themselves are simple - an infrared eye on each side of the opening, aimed to line up within a few degrees. What throws that aim off is everything underneath them moving. Concrete slabs and footings in this climate go through real freeze-thaw cycling each winter, heaving slightly as the ground beneath them freezes and settles back as it thaws. A garage floor or apron that shifts a quarter inch over a winter is enough to tip a sensor mounted low on the track rail out of its aimed line. Cold also contracts the metal track and mounting brackets themselves, which is why a lot of McHenry homeowners notice the door working fine in October and blinking an obstruction error by January. The sensors aren't failing - the structure around them is doing what this climate makes it do every year.
The Situation
Here's the honest limit: if your garage was built in the median era for this area, around 1987, and nobody's touched the sensor brackets since, a straight re-align is sometimes just a stopgap. Wood trim that's been swelling and drying for that long won't hold a bracket steady no matter how many times you square it up. In that case the right call is a new mounting point - something screwed into the track itself rather than the trim - not another round of adjustment. We won't talk you into replacing an opener over a sensor that just needs a better anchor, but we also won't keep re-aligning a bracket that's going to drift again in a month. If you're not sure which one you've got, that's a five-minute look, not a guess.
