A Frustrating Afternoon

Our garage door opener was broken, and I needed to fix it.

A couple of days ago, our Genie garage door opener started acting funny. It wouldn’t close all the way, inexplicably reversing at some point on it’s way down. With a bit of persistence, it could eventually be made to close. Afterwards, it seemed like it was OK.

When the problem recurred a second time, I started investigating. That’s when things went downhill fast. I thought perhaps the “force close” setting was off, so I tried adjusting that. The power started cutting out entirely for the board. I eventually ended up calling Genie customer support and after about an hour on the phone and trying various things and debugging, it was determined that the circuit board had failed.

The unit was out of warranty and the support person told me they could send out a new board, but it was $85 dollars or so. She advised me that with the age of the opener, my money might be better spent on a new more modern opener since the motor was near the end of its life as well. After checking the prices, I ended up following her advice.

Today, I spent the afternoon installing the new garage door opener. It’s one of Genie’s SilentMax models, which is belt driven. I’d have preferred the chain version, but the belt versions were all that was available at the hardware stores. The install wasn’t overly difficult and most of the tedious marking and measuring had already been done to install the previous unit. It only took a couple hours for me to take the old one down and get the new one up in its place. I’ll add that the instructions supplied with the unit were excellent.

I then followed the instructions in the manual for setting up the unit. The process consists of setting the fully closed point, the fully open point and then testing the force close. The force close test makes sure the unit will stop closing and then reverse and open if there is an obstruction in the way of the door. I couldn’t get the closed limit set properly so that the force close test worked. So I kept incrementally adjusting the down limit. The problem was, I could here the motor straining under the load, so I couldn’t keep doing this.

It was while I was struggling with that whole sequence when I heard a loud pop. Shortly after that, the carriage that serves as a means to connect the door to the belt stopped travelling with the belt, and I realized that in less than a day, I’d broken the damn thing.

My hope was I could possibly fix the carriage, but after another call to Genie, I was disabused of that notion. It was broken, no fixing it. The only good is it is under warranty and they sent me a replacement carriage, which won’t be here until later next week.

So after an afternoon’s worth of work, I was back where I’d started. Our garage door opener is broken, and I need to fix it.