Friday, April 13, 2012

Mighty Mule Gate Opener - One Beep and It Won’t Close

We have a Mighty Mule 502 gate opener for the front gate. It’s been up there 4 or 5 years, and it’s worked well. We rarely use it, but there are times my wife has the horses in the front pasture, and we just want to keep them from wandering away.

Photo Apr 13, 2 52 43 PM

Yesterday I went out there and pressed the button to close the gate so the horses could be in front. I got one beep and nothing happened. I tried all the remotes and the hard wired button, but none of them worked.

Grrrr.

I disconnected the arms, closed the gate with a bungie cord and went on my day. Today I checked the GTO website and the troubleshooter mentioned power as being a problem when you get one beep. So I drove up there, disconnected both batteries and brought them home. One was clearly the original older one, and had corrosion on the terminal. I cleaned that off, connected it to the charger and got nothing.

The newer battery showed a tiny charge, so I hooked it up and planned to get another battery today. I did, and when I hooked it up, things started working right away. Good to know one beep is power.

However they didn’t completely work. The gates closed like this:

Photo Apr 13, 2 53 10 PM

Not exactly secure enough for our horses, some of whom would be nosy enough to slip out.

So I went home, downloaded a manual, and printer out the programming pages. I went back up and had an issue. The instructions and diagrams didn’t match my gate. I double checked the model number, 502, and looked again. No luck.

I called the company and got a tech support guy who gave me some instructions. We were working through the setting, when we got cut off. Right after he told me to turn off auto close the wrong way, using instructions from the newer models.

Double Grrrrr.

I had to get kids, so I picked up Kendall and then started searching the Mightymule.com site. I found the old, discontinued model here: http://www.mightymule.com/PDF/Manuals/FM502-Mighty-Mule-g.pdf

Using those instructions, I re-programmed the limits, after turning off the auto-close (dip switch 3), and things started working.

Once again, the gate works, at a fairly low cost in $$, but a good cost in time.

9 comments:

atblogger said...

Thank you for the information. Same problem here on how gate closes. So the problem was the auto close on the green control board. Any idea what caused the problem and was there any solution that would allow use of auto-close(putting dip switch to "on"). Thanks

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing your ideas. But your story does not highlight the exact problem. Is the problem still occurring despite cleaning and maintaining the automatic gate opener at regular intervals?

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