Kelvin is a settled residential grid on Sandton's eastern edge, with long-standing installations and a good proportion of gates that are now genuinely at the end of their working life.
Replacement rather than repair
More Kelvin callouts end in a replacement recommendation than in most suburbs, and the reason is parts.
A great many gates here run motors that are no longer supported: boards not stocked, gear sets unavailable, and a gearbox that has done its decades. Rebuilding one of those is money spent on a machine whose next failure cannot be sourced.
We say that before quoting rather than after. There is no sense repairing a unit twice when the second repair will not be possible. On a slider, the track and the rack are dealt with under sliding gate repairs.
What a replacement should include
The motor matched to the gate's weight, travel and cycle count rather than to a price point. Safety beams aligned and tested by interruption. Remotes coded and counted on the invoice.
Cabling in conduit and terminated where rain cannot reach it, and civils that are level and given time to cure — because those outlast the motor and determine how easily the next one goes on. Where the fault turns out to be the motor itself, that is ordinary gate motor repair work rather than anything exotic.
And a manual release somebody in the household has operated before the technician leaves.
The gate itself
Before any new motor goes on, the gate gets checked: frame for square, wheels and track for wear, hinges and posts on a swing gate.
Automating or re-automating a gate that drags simply transfers the strain to new hardware, and it is why some replacements fail as quickly as the units they replaced.
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