The gate motor and the solar security light: the small-service list that keeps both alive through harmattan

The gate motor and the solar pillar light are the house's two permanently-outdoor electrical devices, and they fail the same way for the same reasons: the sun cooks the electronics, the rain finds the cable entry, and the dust packs the moving parts. Both are serviced by one afternoon's walk with the same small kit - cloth, brush, a screwdriver, hose water, not the pressure washer.

Gate motor: the four checks

• Humming, no movement - the run capacitor. The motor's starting capacitor is the part that loses its strength quietly; the gate stops, the buzz stays, and a push moves it free. A fan-repair shop tests and matches capacitors for the price of the call-out itself, and the matching list (microfarads and voltage on the label) is photographed in thirty seconds - that photo is the whole shopping trip.
• Reverses for no reason - the photocells. The eye-and-target pair by the floor is what makes the gate stop for a car; a dust film, a spider's Sunday architecture, or a millimetre knocked out of alignment and the gate "sees" an invisible car forever. Wipe the faces, sight the brackets (a phone camera at one end, the reflector at the other, the light on the motor board as the judge), realign, re-tighten.
• The rack and the hinge line: grit in a toothed rack is the sound of teeth dying - brush it, check every bolt on the bracket plates and the rack's fixings (the gate's own vibration walks them loose before anything else), and the swing gates' hinges take the same treatment with the grease nipple as the prize. A gate that drags at one point of its arc has a foundation, not a motor, problem - the post's concrete foot has shifted or the ground has moved with a drain washing under it, and that is the mason's job before the technician's.
• Battery and board: the quarter-year glance: the backup battery's terminals for the white or green bloom (clean, grease thin, retighten - the gate that "stopped working" is the voltage drop at a corroded terminal nine times out of ten at the end of the rains), and the board's little LEDs for the fault code the manual decodes; surge is the board's other killer - a proper earth at the controller cabinet is what makes a lightning season survivable, and if the cabinet's earth wire is decorative, that is the electrician's five-minute job on the next visit.

Solar security lights: the honest maintenance

The panel face gets the cloth - a film of harmattan dust on a mini-panel is the difference between a full charge and a sensor that dims by 10pm; the lamp head's vent and PIR lens get the brush, because a wasp's nest and a dust lens are the two "the light is crazy now" faults before the electronics are ever accused. The sensor's false triggers - the cat, the shrub the wind moves, the parked car's engine heat - are aim-and-reach adjustments, not faults; most units carry the two dials (sensitivity, time) and the rule "aim low, across the path, not along it." The one real replacement decision: the battery. These lights charge a small lithium or NiMH cell every day, and after two harmattans the dim-by-midnight light is a battery, sold by theAh matching, not a new light - the solar-repair area stocks them and a solder tab swap is the whole job for the patient hands.

What this desk will not promise

Anything inside a sealed board, any gate that grinds from the gearbox itself, and the mains-voltage side of an installation with no isolation switch to prove the work was done right - those are the tradesperson's line, and the service list above exists to make sure you are paying them for the repair and not for the dust.