I Dream of Genie

Garage door openers are a handy thing to have  when they work.  When they don’t, they’re a real pain – much worse than having no opener installed at all.

Their job is really simple.  When the button on the wall or on the remote is pushed, the opener should run until the door is up – or if it was already up, the opener should run until the door is down. 

There are a couple of exceptions – safety features – built in.  If the door hits an obstruction, or if something blocks the sensors, the motor is supposed to reverse, lifting the door back up.

Lately, the opener on our big double garage door has been acting up.  It not only would stop and reverse directions on the way down, it was doing it on the way up!  Just getting the door up had become an real crap shoot.

Over that last few weeks, I had lubed everything that moved on the door and the opener with no success.  I had tweaked the knobs labeled “force adjustment” on the opener and it seemed to fix the problem – until the next time I needed the door open.

At this point, I decided “When all else fails, read the directions,” and I went to the GENIE website for troubleshooting tips.  In spite of some stuff about a lifetime warranty, the website said that if your opener was over 10 years old to throw it away and get a new one.

I’m more-or-less taking their advice. 

We also had an opener installed on the small single-car door, but I had disconnected it years ago.  I didn’t want to carry two remotes, and when I programmed them both to work on the same remote, it was impossible to get them to consistently work together.  One door was always going up while the other was going down.  It didn’t take long to decide that having an opener on the smaller single door was more trouble than it was worth.

What should have been a simple swap has become complicated – sort of like the Ram truck problem I talked about on Sunday . 

After carefully labeling the wires going to the six screws on the bad opener, I took it down.  Then when I went to remove the other one, I found that – even though they were the same model and looked identical from the outside – the one that was mounted on the small door only had three wire terminals  instead of six!

I ran out of time (and energy) yesterday, but think I’ve figured out how to make it work.  I’ll let you know tomorrow.