Not Every Electric Garage Door Opener Can Open Every Garage Door!
If you’re just building your new garage, you’ve probably already made the no-brainer decision to use an electric garage door opener. What you may not have thought about is the fact that there are a lot of different types of electric garage door opener on the market, and not every type is appropriate for every job.
Garage doors can be extraordinarily heavy — even the thinnest sheet of steel weighs dozens of kilos when it’s seven feet tall and seven feet wide! They’re also extremely cumbersome, to boot. Add insulation, or make the door out of hardwood, and you’re rapidly getting to unusable territory unless you have the right machine for the job. When you stack on the additional torque required by roller garage doors versus multipanel overhead garage doors versus single-panel tilting doors, you’ve got a puzzle you need a lot of information to solve.
The various types of electric garage door opener vary widely in their abilities. There are basically three types of drive available on these machines: chain, screw, and belt. Each has its own benefits and drawbacks. (There are also torsion-spring drives available, but these require precision and expertise to install properly and aren’t anything that a homeowner should be attempting to use without qualified on-site help.)
The original, tried-and-true electric garage door opener is the ‘chain drive’. This type has a chain that looks very much a bicycle chain which the motor drives. They make quite a racket, and they require regular lubrication and replacement or adjustment as the gears and chain age and expand and contract with the seasonal temperature changes.
The next step up is the belt-based opener. Widely considered to be the most maintenance-free type of electric garage door opener, the belt type opener is also the fastest. The installation process is pretty much the same as for a chain drive system. This form of garage opener has the fewest moving parts of any of the three major kinds, and produces significantly less noise than a chain drive unit. They tend to run about £50 more than their chain-drive counterparts, but it’s well worth it just to have a garage door that opens twice as quickly as your old one.
The belt-driven electric garage door opener has the distinct advantage of being quiet. There are not metal-on-metal connections in a belt-driven system, except for the noise of the wheels on the side of the doors moving in their tracks, and, if you have one of the new sectional garage doors, it’s entirely reasonable to put a belt-driven garage door directly adjacent to a bedroom; that’s how quiet they are.
Finally screw drive openers are available from some US manufacturers but are considered outdated in the UK.
All three models come with motors of varying strengths, and it’s critically important to get a motor that’s powerful enough to lift your garage door. Generally speaking, the more expensive the electric garage door opener the more likely it will handle whatever you may have but always check the lifting force first.
Where Did Electric garage door openers Come From?
Nearly everyone that rents or owns a home has a garage, and most of them enjoy the use of electric electric garage door openers. But few people have ever looked into the history of these valuable bits of home machinery.
Electric garage door openers
In 1926, C.G. Johnson of Hartford City Indiana developed the first overhead electric electric garage door openers. Many people believe that electric garage door openers produce enough torque to pull the garage door up on its own, but in reality, the door is far to heavy for a small electric motor to move at all. The truth is, a pair or more of powerful springs under constant tension provide the bulk of the lifting power — just not quite enough to pull the door up on their own. The motor operates a winch that rotates a bicycle-like chain connected to the door, providing that little bit of extra lift that it takes to move it up and down.
The door itself has wheels on its sides that roll along inside of a track, which guides the door into the right position. Limiting switches on the track tell the motor to stop rotating when the door reaches the full-open or full-close positions, and most motors come with on board limiters that can be set as well. The motor itself also serves as a lock, keeping the garage door from opening.
Almost every modern electric garage door openers also feature quick-release disconnects that allow you to disengage the garage door from the machinery, allowing you to access your garage even if the machine breaks down and prevents you from opening your garage door any other way.
Remote Control
The first remote-control electric garage door openers were very simple, using only a transmitter and a receiver which activated the motor. The transmitter used a unique frequency, and the receiver had to be tuned to the same frequency. When the receiver ‘heard’ its signal, it would activate the motor, which would raise or lower the door appropriately.
When it first came into public use, this was cutting-edge technology, fresh in from World War II. In the fighting, the system was used to remotely detonate bombs. That said, it was not without it’s drawbacks: even at the lowest possible signal strength, the remotes activated nearby units and other mechanisms that used similar technology.
That means that your neighbors frequently and constantly opened and closed your garage door by mistake. Of course, it didn’t take manufacturers long to fix this flaw. By equipping each remote and receiver with a variety of possible frequencies, it was made far less likely that you would accidentally activate a neighbor’s remote.
Modern electric garage door openers have remotes with special features that prevent criminals from duplicating or copying the frequency of a remote or from reprogramming a remote to a different frequency in order to open garage doors unintended by the remote’s owner. With ‘hopping’ or ‘rolling code’ technology, each time the remote’s button is pushed, the receiver, in addition to opening the garage door, sends a signal back to the remote that tells it which frequency to use on the next button-push. This practically guarantees that any given remote will only work on the correct garage opener.
Maintaining your Garage Door
If your garage door opener is broken, you’ve immediately got several different problems looming on your horizon — the cost of the garage parts being one of the least of your concerns. If it’s stuck open, you’re looking at a home security issue that could lead to burglary or home invasion, an insulation and water leak that could damage any belongings you have stored in your garage, and of course, your car is in danger of being stolen! If it’s closed, then your car is in even more danger out in the open — and of course you have the inconvenience of being unable to access the contents of your garage from the outside.
But that assumes that the door is totally broken, and we addressed whole-door repair a few days ago. There are lots of / other small ways that garage parts can go wrong, and each requires its own little bit of maintenance.
The door goes up and down by itself.
Most likely, this is simply an issue of you sharing a bit of garage door opener bandwidth with a nearby neighbor. Follow the given instructions on how to change your system’s frequency, and this problem should vanish.
The door only closes halfway, then reopens.
This is frequently the result of a dirty or cracked lens on your garage door opener’s photocell safety system. The lenses are one of those garage parts that few people think to maintain properly. These systems are present to keep the garage door from closing on a car or a child — it is supposed to detect an obstruction and retract the door. If there is a problem with the lens, you might need to clean it with a dry clean cloth — or if it’s physically damaged, you may need to replace it.
Pressing the button on your garage opener does nothing.
One of the most common complaints about any garage door opener is that the garage simply stops opening when you push the button. This is one of the simplest garage parts to fix: a vast majority of the time, you simply need new batteries. If that doesn’t work, you simply need a new remote or to reprogram it.
The garage door opener doesn’t automatically stop if the opening is obstructed.
This is a particularly dangerous occurrence — doubly so if your door is also opening and closing unexpectedly due to a bandwidth overlap — as it can cause injury or death in children. If you notice this occurring, immediately contact your garage parts supplier and find it what it will take to get, at the minimum, a new safety mechanism put in.
Dozens of other people’s remotes work on your garage door opener.
This is a kind of a repeat from above, but it’s worth noting because it happens so regularly with cheaper models. Even if no one in your road is using the factory settings on their garage door openers, if you never change the bandwidth, that means anyone who has a factory-generic setting on their opener can use it to open your garage door. So make sure you change it!
By keeping these simple DIY repair tasks up-to-date and double-checking your garage parts at least once a year, you will ensure that your garage door opener remains a valuable asset to your home and family.
Garage Door Sizes To Consider During Construction
After a new home or garage is built, it’s too late to think about which garage door sizes are going to work best for your family. Assuming that a standard sized door is going to be right for you can be a serious mistake, because once you’ve made that decision, it will take thousands of pounds of remodeling to unmake it. It’s difficult to understate the advantages of an over sized garage.
Even if you’re currently driving a single VW Golf and little else, you need to look further down the line. Standard garage doors run seven feet by seven feet — you might fit a normal medium-sized car in there without a problem, but what if you have a family before you move out of the house? A standard garage door is going to be tough to deal with in a people carrier or a 4×4 vehicle. Similarly, if you need something to be delivered to your home, an 8-foot clearance just isn’t enough for an everyday pickup truck with, say, a normal piano or a decently-sized bookshelf in the back.
On the other hand, if you work with your architect and builder beforehand, you’ll find that it’s not terribly expensive to add a foot to the width of your garage, and you’ll have a lot more options if you have a nine-foot garage door. A 4×4 with luggage or a canoe on the top wouldn’t make it through the normal garage door sizes, but an extra foot will make all of the difference. Eight feet might be a bit tall for some people to open and close by hand, but that’s why we have automatic garage door openers.
If you own a utility trailer or a boat, you know from experience that they are usually significantly wider than the car or van you tow them with — sometimes close to nine feet wide! Unless you think ahead and take the possibility that you’ll end up with one of these items into consideration during construction, you’ll have to leave your pretty toys out in the elements.
Anyone who has to back a trailer of any size into a garage will be grateful for the extra width of a 10- or 12-foot wide door. Also, widths of 14 feet and over are invaluably important if you have multiple cars, especially if they are both expensive, as it prevents dings and mirror bumping.
Talk to your builder and/or architect about designing an over sized garage and the effect that it will have on your life in addition to it’s value to the home. Even if you never use the garage for anything special, the larger garage door sizes will help add curb appeal and interest to anyone looking to buy your home in the future. The cost might seem like a bit up front, but the increase in your property value could be substantial. This is particularly true if your over sized garage comes equipped with high-end sectional garage doors, with insulation, weatherproofing, and automated garage door openers as well.
