Five Reasons To Replace Your Electric Garage Door Openers — Even If It Works!

Replacing your electric garage door openers seems like an unnecessary expense until they completely breaks down, but in reality garage door openers are complex machines that may hide several problems. In addition, manufacturers regularly come out with new, innovative additions or alterations to their older models which can add significant performance, safety, and convenience.

Here are the top five reasons you might want to consider replacing your garage door opener even if it seems to be working decently.

Safety Reversal
If you have an old-model garage door opener with no safety reversal, or your safety reversal system doesn’t work, it should be replaced immediately! Manufacturers are required by law to equip their electric garage door openers with these devices, which generally consist of a pair of sensors placed about six inches off the ground, just on either side of the door. If the sensors detect something that would obstruct the door closing, they tell the motor to stop and re-open the door before it closes more than halfway.

Noise
Most new models of garage door opener are quiet and smooth. They utilize screw-based drives that run with significantly less noise pollution than the old models. The old models use a chain-based system that looks significantly like a bicycle chain — and it rattles, squeaks, and groans like one as well. If you look at your electric garage door openers and you see something that looks like a bicycle chain coming out, you may want to strongly consider replacing them.

Security
For quite some time, it was common for home invaders and burglars to cruise the streets and click their garage door remotes at every house they drove by. If they found one that worked — which was surprisingly easy to do — they would watch it, and use their remote to break in to the house once everyone was out. Since then, the criminals have gotten even more clever, using special devices that mimic all of the common signals produced by garage door opener remotes.

To counter that, newer electric garage door openers use special ever-changing signals that are nearly impossible to hack. If you’re not using a model with this feature, you are in much greater danger of being burgled.

Keyless Entry
If you have an early-generation garage door opener, chances are if you didn’t have your keys and your remote got lost or ran out of batteries, you were forced to park your car outside. Today’s electric garage door openers come with keypads that you can access from outside your garage which allow you to open the garage without needing a key. There are even super-modern models which offer fingerprint scanning, allowing you even greater security with your keyless entry system.

It is possible to purchase a keypad separately and add it to your existing system, but in most cases it’s more reliable and more effective to simply purchase a new garage door opener in its entirety.

Battery Backup
Your garage door opener probably won’t work if there’s a power outage. Since blackouts frequently occur during storms, you’re looking at the worst possible time to leave your car out in the open. Modern electric garage door openers come with battery backups which allow them to operate several dozen times without needing direct power — and when the power does come back on, they recharge the batteries automatically!

These are just a few of the ways in which modern electric garage door openers are clearly superior to the older models, any one of which makes a good reason to replace your system even if it seems to be working for you.