Garage Door Opener Update

When last we’d spoken of this saga, I had broken the carriage that runs in the track of the new garage door opener. The carriage has an arm that hangs down and is attached to the garage door. Additionally, the carriage catches on a “bullet” (Genie’s term) that’s on the belt. Thus, without the carriage the garage door opener is useless. I’d broken the carriage while trying to get the opener to properly detect an obstruction under the door such that it would stop travelling down and then reverse and go back up.

The replacement arrived from Genie today, free of charge. Many kudos to Genie for that. So I spent about an hour reinstalling the carriage. It’s a time consuming operations because the track has to be disassembled to remove the old one and then reassembled with the new one in place. In order to disassemble the track, it has to be disconnected from the wall and the motor. Oh well.

The good news is the operation is a straight-forward one, regardless of the tedium involved. I had everything back hooked back up in less than 30 minutes. I proceeded through the setup process again, upper and lower limits, and then tested the force-close for the door. I had the same results as last time. Luckily, I didn’t break the carriage this time around.

What I noticed this time around is that the track bowed when under strain. In fact, if probably bowed a good 2 inches or so. Which got me to thinking that the motor probably wasn’t sensing force so much as it was measuring distance. Or, more correctly, the travel distance of the belt. Why else would the setting the lower limit be required prior to testing the “force close”?

Anyway, if it was measuring distance then the flex in the track was probably enough to allow the belt to travel such that the motor CPU simply thought the door was in the full down position. Thus, a simple way to fix the problem was to put a stop above the track to prevent it from flexing. So I cut a 2×4 to length so that it ran from the track, while in it’s normal unstrained position, up to a joist directly above the track. The 2×4 simply blocks the track from flexing upwards like it had been doing, thereby eliminating any false travel i.e., travel that wasn’t due to the door going down.

On the next test, the opener performed as expected. Without the play from the track flexing, the motor stopped and reversed direction with the obstruction under the door preventing it from closing all the way.

With that problem fixed, it was a small matter to complete the setup, including getting the remotes to work with the new opener and the other opener (an older Genie model). I also managed to get our car’s built-in garage door opener to work with the new opener. So we are finally back to square 1 where garage doors are concerned.