By Karlis Elmanis · 30 June 2026
If your electric gate keeps playing up — opening when it feels like it, stopping halfway, tripping the power, dying every winter — you're probably weighing up the same question we get asked on doorsteps across Sussex, Surrey and Kent every week: *do I keep paying to fix this thing, or is it time to start again?*
Here's the honest answer from someone who fixes gates for a living: most gates are worth repairing. A worn part is a cheap part. But a small number of gates keep failing no matter what you replace — and that's almost never bad luck. It's because the gate was wired and weatherproofed badly from the day it went in. On those, you can keep buying repairs forever, or do it once, properly.
This guide is how we tell the two apart.
Most gate faults are cheap fixes
Let's start with the good news, because it covers the majority of callouts. The usual suspects are small, well-understood parts:
- A failed capacitor (the bit that gives the motor its kick to start) — a £20-ish part.
- A tired control board or receiver — replaced in an hour or two.
- A photocell (safety beam) that's drifted out of line.
- Hinges or a track that have seized and are making the motor work too hard.
If your gate has one of these and everything else about it is sound, it's a straightforward repair and the gate has years of life left. Don't let anyone talk you into replacing a whole system because of a £20 part.
So when *isn't* it that simple?
When it's not the part — it's the install
A repair fixes a part. It can't fix the foundations the gate was built on. These are the three things we find again and again that no single repair will ever cure — and the reason a gate "keeps breaking down for no reason."
The wrong, too-thin cable
This is the big one, and it's everywhere. A huge number of gates have their safety beams, keypad and intercom run in thin telecom (Cat5) cable — the stuff meant for phone and network points indoors.
Think of the cable like a water pipe. Telecom cable is a drinking straw: fine for carrying a tiny signal, but it starves a gate's sensors and keypad of steady power, especially on a long run from the house. Proper gate control cable has more than twice the copper inside — the size the motor manufacturers' own manuals call for — so the sensors get clean, reliable power and keep working through winter instead of dropping out the moment it's cold and damp.
You can't fix this with a part. The whole loom is undersized. The gate will keep throwing odd, intermittent faults until the right cable goes in.
Water sitting in the boxes
Underground motors live in a metal "foundation box" buried at the gate post, and the wiring joints live in boxes too. Any buried or outdoor box slowly fills with water — partly rain getting in through unsealed cable holes, partly damp air being drawn down the cable ducts and turning to water inside. (Yes, even a box that looks sealed.)
Sit a motor's electrics in that and you get corrosion, tripping, and a slow death for the motor or control board. A flooded box isn't bad luck — it's the predictable result of the wrong box, no drainage underneath, and cable holes that were never sealed. We've pulled motors out of boxes that were half full of water.
No way to safely switch it off
Plenty of gates are wired straight back to a socket or a hidden joint in the house, with no switch at the gate to cut the power. That matters more than people realise. Anyone working on the gate — to service it, clear a fault, or free someone trapped behind it — needs a switch right there that guarantees the motor can't suddenly spring to life. And you, the owner, need a fast way to kill it in an emergency.
A weatherproof, lockable cut-off switch at the gate is what the wiring rules expect for anything outdoors. When it's missing, the safety trip and the earthing have usually been skipped too — which means the electrical side was never done to standard.
You can see real photos of all of this on our what we find on site page.
Repair or reinstall? The test we use
We always start from *your* interest, not the sale: fix what can be sensibly fixed. Here's the simple traffic-light test we run in our heads on every callout.
🟢 Green — we just fix it. One part has failed and everything else is sound: the cabling, the safety devices, the boxes, the power supply. Most gates are here. We repair it and you're done.
🟡 Amber — we repair now, and tell you what's coming. The gate works but a weakness is building — an ageing motor near the end of its life, a box starting to corrode, a safety part that should be added. We repair it and put a rough timeline on the rest, so there's no surprise bill later.
🔴 Red — a clean reinstall is the smart money. Several things are wrong at once: the wrong, too-thin cable throughout; no working safety devices and no easy way to add them; no power cut-off; flooded, corroded boxes; or we've been back two or three times and each fix just exposes the next fault.
The honest test for that red zone is this: when the next repair, plus the repairs we can already see coming, get close to the cost of doing it once properly — and the current setup can't be made safe by a repair — a reinstall is the cheaper choice over the next few years, not the dearer one. It's one bill that ends the cycle, instead of a string of callouts that never fix the root cause.
What does it actually cost — repair vs reinstall?
Most gate firms won't put numbers on a page like this. We will. Everything below is +VAT.
A typical repair is a callout plus a part. Across Sussex, Surrey and Kent our standard callout is £225+VAT, and the common fixes — a capacitor, a photocell, a control board — add roughly £30 to £400 in parts. So a normal repair that buys you years of life lands around £250–£650+VAT all-in (more if it needs a whole new motor). For most gates, that's exactly the right answer.
A full reinstall — keeping your existing gate but rebuilding the automation properly, with the right cable, sealed and drained boxes, working safety and a proper power cut-off — typically runs £1,500–£3,500+VAT, depending on the gate and what's involved.
The reinstall only wins on price when the repairs stop ending. One fix on a sound gate is always worth it. But once you're two or three callouts deep in a year, and the cable, boxes and safety all need doing anyway, those repairs — plus the ones we can already see coming — start to close in on the cost of doing it once. That's the tipping point. We'll always show you both numbers so you can see it for yourself.
"Isn't a reinstall just an expensive way to sell me a new gate?"
Fair question — and the answer is no. A reinstall keeps your existing gate (the steel or timber itself, which is usually fine) and rebuilds the automation properly: the right cable, sealed and drained boxes, working safety devices, and a proper power cut-off. You're not buying a new gate. You're buying the install your gate should have had the first time.
And here's our promise: even on a gate we'd reinstall, we'll always quote the repair too — so you can compare the two and decide for yourself. If the repair makes sense, we'll tell you.
A quick word on safety
This isn't just about reliability. In the UK, the law is simple: a powered gate has to be safe to use. The recognised way to get there is the right mix of safety devices — force limits so the gate stops when it meets resistance, safety beams, and pressure-sensitive safety edges — set up and tested properly, plus a mains supply wired to the current standards. A gate with no working safety and dodgy electrics isn't just unreliable; it's a genuine hazard, and it leaves you exposed if anyone is ever hurt. Bringing a gate up to standard is often the real reason a tired, badly-installed system is better reinstalled than patched again.