Electric Garage Door Opener

Get a Roller Garage Door with an Electric Garage Door Opener

An electric garage door opener is a huge boon to any household and some businesses, but they don’t work on all garage doors. Many garage doors are of the one-piece variety: a massive panel of wood or metal that simply rotates upward when opened. Electric garage door openers don’t work on one-piece doors; they must be used on roller garage doors. These kinds of doors are made up of many small panels that allow the door to travel around a smaller corner as it is raised and lowered.

There are many benefits to having a roller garage door, and they are only multiplied when you add an electric garage door opener.

Security

Like any other door, roller garage doors prevent easy access to your home through the garage. Roller doors are much harder to cut through than one-piece doors, making them slightly more secure than a single panel.

Weatherization

The garage offers protection to your car, not only from other people, but from the elements. With a weather-sealed roller door on your garage, your car will stay dust- and bird-dropping free as well as staying closer to room temperature, making a cold morning startup a much more efficient process.

Space

Roller doors offer much more space efficiency than single-panel doors. Both in terms of allowing a taller vehicle and in allowing you to maximize storage space in your garage, a roller door is the way to go.

Stability

Roller garage doors need no counterbalancing mechanism, meaning that there’s no chance of the mechanism failing and the door closing unexpectedly. Once it’s in the up position, gravity actually helps keep it in place rather than encouraging it to fall.

Electric Garage Door Opener

Roller doors can be automated with an electric garage door opener. This is perhaps the most significant advantage of a roller garage door, because it opens the path to many other advantageous elements:

Convenience

The obvious: when it’s snowing, or hot, or rainy, or you are just plain tired, an electric garage door opener allows you to get the door open from the comfort of your vehicle and without strain.

Safety

If your driveway is poorly lit, it can be dangerous to stumble about in the dark to open your garage door. Similarly, the lights on an automated garage door opener guarantee that your garage is never too dark to navigate when you finally get home.

Access

Most decent electric garage door openers come with keypad entry, so even if you don’t have your house keys and your remote is out of batteries, you always have a safe way to get inside. You might want to look at the Seip electric operators.

Comparing the cost of decent roller garage doors and electric garage door openers with the benefits of owning and using them, the analysis is clear: if you own a garage, you should own a roller door and an electric opener. If you’re having trouble deciding where to find the right roller door and electric opener for you, check out the Hormann garage doors offered here at the Garage Door SuperStore.

Electric Garage Door Openers

Electric Garage Door Openers — Necessary Maintenance

Electric garage door openers are extraordinarily useful and convenient devices, but as many homeowners have discovered too late, they are not without their needs. Without regular inspection and maintenance, an electric garage door opener can suddenly and unexpectedly become quite a burden. To keep your opener working as long as possible, there are a few simple steps you should take at least twice a year — during fall and spring if you live in a temperate climate, simply because there are no temperature extremes that can cause you to slightly misadjust the device.

Start your inspection by looking at every part of the system. Look for loose bolts or screws, worn or distorted metal, dirty tracks, rusty or bent springs, levers, hinges, and cables, and frayed electrical wire. Keep the mechanism clean and if you see any signs of metal stress or unexpected bends, dents, or distortions, it’s time for a test run.

Use the electric garage door opener first, keeping careful watch for any trembles, hiccups, or unexpected noises as the door descends. If you see something significant, move on to step two: raise the door back up, use the manual disconnect to detach the door from the opener, and lower it by hand.

If the problems go away, you have an issue because the flaw is with the opener itself. Electric garage door openers are stable, reliable machines, but they can go wrong quickly and profoundly. It’s often less expensive to replace a chain drive opener than it is to have it repaired, and screw drive systems rarely break just a little bit – but belt drive systems can frequently be repaired more inexpensively than they can be replaced.

If the doors are still difficult to open and close when the opener is disconnected, then the problem is either the tracks or the springs. Start by cleaning and tightening the tracks and lubricating everything with a light oil; it’s a simple process that will solve most problems. If it doesn’t, it’s time to examine the springs.

The springs should be able to keep the door exactly half open without any assistance on your part — if they can’t, they’re likely the culprit. If the door starts to go up from halfway, the springs are too tight and need to be loosened. More likely, if the door starts to descend and then suddenly crashes down, your springs are worn out and must be replaced. Don’t ever do this yourself; the springs are under extreme tension and are very dangerous to disconnect.

If your garage door is made of wood, you will need to repaint the outside of your door every two to three years. If your door is a once-piece door and it spends any amount of time in the open position, examine it for sagging and consider adding a metal reinforcing strip or two if you see any evidence of it

Garage Door Openers

Garage Door Openers – Know Your Options

Electric garage door openers aren’t as simple as they used to be. If you’re a first-timer looking to buy, install, or repair an electric garage door opener — or even if you’re just about to call a specialist to help you out — you’re going to want to know a bit about modern garage door openers before you get started. There are three major categories of electric opener have different needs in terms of tools and expertise as well as different positive attributes:

Chain Drive

A chain drive garage door opener is the most common system for most residential uses. Basically, a motor pulls a chain, which in turn pulls up the door. It’s fairly simple to install and cheap. On the downside, it’s noisy — so noisy that an attached home (or any rooms above the garage) are going to know every time the garage is opened or closed. Some models offer ‘hidden chains’ that reduce the noise slightly, but chain drive openers will always be louder than their more expensive counterparts.

Screw Drive

The screw drive essentially uses a long steel rod with a spiraling divot – essentially a long screw — which spins, lifting the door. With only one moving part, it requires much less maintenance than either of the other options and can be installed my most homeowners with remarkable ease. With plastic tracks in place, a screw drive model is much less noisy than a chain drive — but it has the decided disadvantage of being by far the slowest model. For kids and pets, that’s not a bad thing, but if you use your garage as a workspace (or have any other reason to frequently walk in and out through the garage door), it can be a real pain to wait for the door to get up high enough to walk under.

Belt Drive

Belt drives are by far the most expensive and hardest to install of the electric garage door openers, but they have a couple of advantages that make the effort and expense well worthwhile. First, they’re so quiet that even clanky sheet-metal doors can be opened in the middle of the night without disturbing someone sleeping above the garage. Second, they’re quick to raise and lower the door, which can be a lifesaver if you use your garage for anything other than storing your car.

Of course, there are many elements of electric garage door openers that go with any model you choose. Automatic reverse (with motion detectors, to keep kids and pets from getting pinned under the door), a lighting system so that your garage isn’t dark when you get out of your car, and a manual release for when the power goes out should all be standard options — if the model you’re thinking about doesn’t have them, get a different model. Less necessary but still wise is a keypad entry system, so if your remote runs out of batteries on the road, you can still get your car into the garage.

Garage Door Opener

Installing Your Garage Door Opener

A garage door opener — why bother? Well, have you ever sat in your car as the hail poured down around you and stared at your garage door, dreading getting out and opening the door, but knowing that you can’t just let the hail ding up your vehicle? That’s why to bother. After a long drive in perfect heated-or-air-conditioned temperature, getting out to wrestle with a garage door in humid heat, rain, or even just a morning chill can take the wind out of your sails. If only someone had invented a button that could move that mass for you.

Of course, someone did! It’s called an automatic garage door opener, and it’s pretty easy to buy one. Of course, before you do, you need to decide if you’re going to invest in professional installation or do it yourself. If you do plan to be the one installing your own hardware, there are a few things you need to know before you start:

Tools

Look at the instruction manual of the opener you choose before you buy — and make sure you have all of the tools necessary to install it. If you can easily acquire any missing tools, or you have handy friends that might have them, don’t let your lack get in your way, but if you need something specific and expensive, you need to take that extra cost into account. Be sure you assemble all necessary tools on site before you start the installation process.

Safety

Before you deal with any garage door openers, you need to be sure the door is in excellent condition. That means that it opens and closes with no troubles, it’s properly sealing against the weather, and it’s free of any cracks or warping. Oil all of the moving parts, clean out the track, and wipe down the seal. Switch off your garage’s circuit breaker, and unhook the manual rope levers immediately before the installation.

Operation

Find the center of the door, then open the door entirely so that you can mark the spot where the motor should sit. Install the garage door opener up far enough that it won’t danger any tall vehicles parked beneath it. Read your garage door opener’s instruction manual carefully; the different types of garage door opener work in very different manners.

Finalizing

Once you have your opener up and running, you must adjust the open and close limits so that the door doesn’t plow into the pavement or open past it’s tracks. Also, don’t forget to install and test the motion detectors that keep small children and pets safe from your closing garage doors, even if you have neither yourself. Finally, correctly hook up the manual release kit so that you can operate your garage door even during a power outage.

Remotes and Buttons

Once everything works properly, distribute the remotes between your cars, and hardwire any indoor buttons to the appropriate places in your home (making sure to keep the buttons high enough off the ground that young children can’t operate them). If your garage door opener has a keypad associated with it, wire up and test that as well. Hormann electric operators are a particular favourite.

Having followed all of these steps, you will be pleasantly surprised at how easily your garage door openers can be completely installed and made functional.