Checking It Yourself
Start by looking at the two small boxes near the bottom of each track, roughly six inches off the floor. Each has a tiny LED. One should glow steady, the other should glow solid when they're looking at each other - check your opener's manual for which color means aligned, since it varies by brand. Wipe both lenses with a dry cloth; dust and cobwebs collect there more than you'd expect in a garage that isn't sealed tight. Next, crouch down and sight along the beam line - if one bracket looks tilted or the mounting screws look loose, that's your culprit, not the electronics. Loosen the wing nut or screw holding the bracket, nudge it gently until both LEDs read solid, then retighten. Test the door three times before you call it fixed. If the lights go solid but the door still won't close, the problem has moved past the sensors into the opener's circuit board or the wiring between them, and that's past what a tightened bracket will solve.
The Seasonal Bit
Here's the part that's specific to this city rather than garages in general. Most of the housing in Newark's service area was built between 1938 and 1996, with a median build year of 1958, and federal law didn't require safety sensors on garage door openers until 1993. That means on a huge share of these houses, the sensors were never part of the original structure - they were added years, sometimes decades, after the door and frame were already settled into their final shape. The bracket got mounted onto whatever wood or masonry existed at install time, not onto anything designed to hold it. Across the 156 named areas that make up this territory, pre-1960 construction is the rule, not the exception, so this isn't a problem limited to one block - it's baked into the age of the housing stock itself. Add Newark's severe cold winters on top of that older framing and you get a predictable seasonal pattern: sensors that held alignment fine all summer start drifting as soon as the first hard freeze sets in, then settle again once spring thaw is done.
