Signs You Need to Replace Your Garage Door Opener

Signs You Need to Replace Your Garage Door Opener

The garage door opener makes your garage door system function at the touch of a button. If your opener isn’t working as expected, it may be time for a replacement. When you know the signs of a malfunctioning garage door opener, you can set up an appointment with a service professional right away to replace your unit before it breaks down.

The Importance of a Functioning Garage Door Opener

A functional garage door is a necessity for many homeowners, so it’s greatly missed when the opener stops working correctly. Installing a new garage door opener can offer many benefits, including:

• A convenient way to get in and out of your garage with minimal effort.
• Safe operation to prevent personal injury or property damage when using the garage door.
• Security for keeping your home and belongings safe from an intruder.

How to Tell You Need a Garage Door Opener Replacement

Your garage door may display the following symptoms if it needs to be replaced:

Garage Door Won’t Open or Close

If you press the button to open or close the door and it doesn’t move, your garage door opener is malfunctioning. In some cases, this problem may be fixed by replacing the batteries in your remotes, reconnecting the door to the garage door opener or removing blockages from the track.

Garage Door Opener Works Sporadically

A malfunctioning garage door opener works only when it wants to, which can be an annoying problem to deal with when you want to leave or enter your garage. The batteries or wiring could be the source of the problem, or it could mean your garage door opener needs to be replaced.

Garage Door Moves on Its Own

Does your garage door seem to have a mind of its own? A garage door that activates randomly is both a nuisance and a security issue. Circuit board damage or stuck buttons on the wall remote or panel can cause this issue.

Garage Door Reverses Direction

If your garage door opens or closes part or all of the way and then reverses itself, it could mean your photo safety eyes are misaligned, dirty or obstructed. It could also indicate faulty components or wiring. If your garage door is still acting up after you clean and realign the sensors, it could mean your garage door opener is irreparably damaged.

Garage Door Opener Moves Slowly

Garage door opener problems can cause the door to open slower than it should. Worn-out components and poor lubrication of the hinges, rollers and track could make an opener ineffective. This problem also surfaces when a garage door opener is near the end of its life span and needs replacement.

Garage Door Gets Stuck

Faulty garage door systems may get stuck and freeze before closing all the way. This garage door opener problem is concerning because it’s a safety hazard. Besides garage door opener malfunction, broken or bent rollers or tracks or fastener problems could cause a stuck garage door.

Garage Door Opener Makes Unusual Sounds

Is your garage door opener making sounds it’s never made before, like scraping or screeching? The strange sounds could mean the opener needs repair or replacement. If your opener is loud all the time, however, it could simply be due to its age — older garage door openers are more subject to motor strain, making it more difficult to open the door.

Garage Door Opener Is Old

The average life span of a garage door opener is 10 to 15 years. During this time, you’ve likely used the opener several times a day, resulting in thousands of cycles. This level of use and age can cause your opener to stop working. A repair may not be possible if the opener is obsolete.

Old garage door openers are likely to have outdated technology as well, which is easier for would-be criminals to compromise or gain access to your home. Newer openers will have safety features like photo safety eyes to prevent injuries and property damage.

How Much Does It Cost to Replace Your Garage Door Opener?

The cost of a garage door opener replacement from a professional can range from $218 to $525. This cost includes the price of the new opener, replacement parts, labor and removal of your old opener. Some factors that influence the price of a garage door opener installation are the:

• Brand and model of the new opener.
• Type of opener — screw, chain, belt, direct-drive or jackshaft.
• Horsepower rating of the opener, with a higher rating costing more.
• Type and number of remotes and keypads included.
• Cost of labor per hour, which can vary by region.
• Price of installing extra features like sensors, electrical wiring or a backup battery.

Who to Call When You Need to Replace Your Garage Door Opener

When you need your garage door opener replaced, it’s important to call a garage door service professional like Cornwell Door Service to do the job. Many homeowners are unaware of how hard it is to replace a garage door opener on their own. A DIY replacement can be dangerous, especially if you’re unsure how to complete it. A professional installation ensures the opener works properly and maximizes the life span of your new installation.

Contact Cornwell Door Service for Garage Door Opener Replacements in Central Pennsylvania

Cornwell Door Service is a professional garage door opener repair company offering essential services like opener replacements. We work with residential and commercial customers in Camp Hill, Lebanon and Harrisburg. Call 800-820-9841 or contact us online to schedule service today!

How to Deal With a Malfunctioning Garage Door Sensor

When C.G. Johnson invented the first electric garage door opener in 1926 in Hartford Indiana, it must’ve seemed like a little bit of magic. But electric garage door openers only became popular after World War II, when the Era Meter Company of Chicago invented a garage door opener activated by a switch inside the garage or a key panel outside.

Years later, of course, the ability to open or close an electric garage door shrunk to a small remote control that could fit on a keychain along with your car keys. People love the convenience of automatic garage doors. Regulations have been put in place to ensure they are up to the latest safety standards and will function well for long after their installation.

On January 1, 1993, the federal government passed a law that mandated any garage door installed after that date needed to include sensors that would prevent accidents such as the door closing when someone was standing beneath it. Since that date, all garage door openers include door sensors that, once activated, prevent the door from closing until all obstructions are out of the way.

We’ll spend a little more time below talking about how garage door sensors work and what’s happening when they don’t work properly. But first, let’s take a longer look at how automatic garage door openers operate.

• How Do Automatic Garage Doors Work
• What Are Some Reasons My Garage Door Opener May Not Work?
• What Are Garage Door Sensors and How Do They Work?
• How Do I Determine If It’s a Problem With the Garage Door Sensor?
• How Do You Repair Garage Door Opener Sensors?
• Garage Door Opener Not Working in Cold Weather
• How To Disable a Garage Door Safety Sensor

How Do Automatic Garage Doors Work?

The secret to automatic garage door openers is a radio transmitter. Early garage door openers used very simple transmitters and receivers. While it helped to open and close your garage door, it also meant you could open and close any garage door in the neighborhood that also happened to have a similar system. This, of course, led to many humorous moments in TV shows or commercials where somebody accidentally picks up the remote control for the automatic door opener thinking it’s a TV remote, pushes a button and opens their neighbor’s garage door.

These days, garage door openers are radios that work at 350 MHz. When you push the button to open your garage door, it not only transmits a radio signal, but that radio signal also includes an encoded binary number that solely works with the receiver in your garage. Your door will only open once your receiver “recognizes” your binary code number.

But criminals are tricky. Smart ones could use a radio to pick up the code, record it and then play it back outside your garage door to open it and rob you. Fortunately, the people who manufacture garage doors are smarter than the criminals. Each time you use a garage door opener, a new code is created. Both the transmitter and the receiver contain computer chips that recognize the new code each time.

What Are Some Reasons My Garage Door Opener May Not Work?

When you pull up in your car and press your automatic garage door opener, you expect it to work. But what happens when it doesn’t? There are a number of reasons for this possible frustrating failure.

Old Age of the Garage Door Opener

Father time is undefeated, whether you are talking about humans or garage door openers. You can count on about 15,000 operations from a garage door opener before it goes to that great big garage door opener home in the sky.

Most people use their garage door openers about 1,500 times a year, so that means you can expect a good 10 years before any problems caused strictly by aging arise. Like you would with an old car, you can make some fixes to your garage door to keep it going for another few years, but also as would happen with an older car, you should expect to make more costly tweaks and fixes as time goes by.

Bad Batteries for the Garage Door Opener

In some cases, the reason your garage door isn’t working properly comes down to the simplest of explanations — you need new batteries. If your batteries are dead, your transmitter will still work. A good way to check this is to see if the transmitter installed on the inside of the garage still opens the door. If it does, install new batteries in the remote right away. If you press the transmitter and this time it works, problem solved.

Track Not Aligned for the Garage Door Opener

This can be a serious issue. Your door needs to run on a properly aligned metal track to open and close. If gaps between the rollers and the rail develop or the rails bends, this could lead to a difficult and potentially dangerous situation. Although there are more than a few YouTube videos available on the internet that can show you a DIY solution, this is probably a case where you should contact someone familiar with how automatic garage door openers work to come and fix it.

What Are Garage Door Sensors and How Do They Work?

Another reason your garage door may not open is your garage door sensors are malfunctioning. Before we talk about the reasons why it happens and how you can try to fix a garage door sensor, let’s look at how garage door sensors work. The sensors of garage doors have two essential elements:

• Photo-eye: Garage door sensors work with the use of a photo eye system. These infrared sensors are placed on either side of your garage door about two to six inches off the ground. When you press the remote control you use to open your garage door, it sends a signal to the sensors to open the door. But the main purpose of the photo eyes is to prevent the door from closing on someone or something.
• The line of sight: The photo eyes on either side of your door send an infrared beam to each other when the door is open and there is nothing blocking it. The door will only close if the beam remains uninterrupted. But if a person, an animal or a bike is in the way, and the beam is interrupted or blocked, the door will not close but will reopen.

How Do I Determine If It’s a Problem With the Garage Door Sensor?

If your garage door opens normally but then doesn’t close or starts to close and then reopens without any obstructions in the way, there’s a good chance that your garage door sensor is malfunctioning. This could result in two main problems.

The first is that the door won’t close. This issue can arise from a malfunctioning garage door sensor. Press the remote control or hit the electrical switch on the inside of the garage to close the door. If the door starts to close but then stops and reverses so that is completely open again, you know there’s a malfunction.

The second issue occurs when the door closes even with obstruction. This is the other sign of a possibly malfunctioning door sensor, and it’s a much worse problem because there’s a possibility it could cause an injury or significantly damage your car or some other piece of equipment. To determine if the sensors are malfunctioning:

1. Determine how high your photo eyes are above the ground. Once you figure this out, you need to get a few cardboard boxes that are higher than the sensors.
2. Place one of the cardboard boxes in the garage doorway. Make sure the box is also placed in front of one of the photo eyes. Press the remote control button to close the door. If the garage sensor is working properly, the door will stop closing and go back to the open position. If the garage door does not stop closing and crushes the box, then your garage door sensor is malfunctioning.

How Do You Repair Garage Door Opener Sensors?

After you’ve determined that your garage door sensor is not working for either of the above reasons, there are simple tweaks you can make to fix your sensor. If you are wondering how to fix your garage door sensor, try these two ways to fix your garage sensors:

• Dirty lenses: This is most likely the reason a garage door won’t close. The most obvious solution to the problem may be the lenses are dirty. These lenses are made of glass, much like that used in a camera lens. The photo eyes of door sensors are very small and get dirty easily over time. Use a soft cloth with a mild cleaner that does not leave streaks. Gently wipe away dirt or residue from the surface of the eye. Don’t overdo it, because if you get the eye too wet, more dirt will stick to it.
• Out of alignment: Misaligned photo eyes are another reason for malfunctioning garage door sensors. The photo eyes need to be pointed in the same direction, at the very same angle. There is an LED light on the exterior of each sensor. If one of these lights is blinking, it means the sensor is out of alignment. Use a screwdriver to tighten the screws on the bracket holding up the blinking LED light until it is in alignment with the other one. You can also do this by bending the bracket back into its original position. Once you realign the sensor lights, the blinking will stop.

Now it’s time to test your handiwork. Take another cardboard box and put it in front of one of the photo eyes. Press the remote control. If the door starts to close but then reopens because the beam between the realigned photo eyes is now blocked, your mission is successful. If, however, the door continues to close and once again crushes the new cardboard box, you may have a more serious problem.

Check one more time to make sure you have cleaned the lenses properly, the photo eyes are aligned and no LED light is blinking. Try the cardboard test one last time. If the door fails to return to the open position and closes on the cardboard box, it’s time to call in a professional to have a look at the entire system.

Garage Door Opener Not Working in Cold Weather

It’s always possible your issue could be weather-related. If it is icy out, the lining of your garage door may be frozen and that is why the door isn’t going up. Or there could be condensation on your sensors obstructing their utility.

How To Disable a Garage Door Safety Sensor

Until you get your garage door safety sensor working, you may want to disable it until professional help arrives to ensure nothing gets damaged. You can gently twist one, so the sensors do not line up, which will temporarily disable the sensor. You may not want to try anything more in-depth until you have professional help, as you don’t want to damage the system permanently.

Why Should I Call a Professional for My Garage Door Safety Sensors?

The reason we recommend working with a professional if your door sensors are still malfunctioning after the measures taken above is that you could have a problem with the wiring. Anything involving electricity or wiring should always be left to a professional for safety reasons and because further damage can occur if done incorrectly.

It is not impossible for you to do a DIY project of this nature. But wiring can be very tricky and, as you know, potentially dangerous. A garage door professional has the experience and knowledge of working with many different types of systems and has the tools and equipment needed to fix the problem. They will also be able to look at the rest of your garage door system and see if there are any other fixes necessary in order for your door to operate correctly again.

When in doubt, it is better to call a professional when your garage door sensor is not working. In addition to fixing your senor, a garage door professional will also be able to tell you if the problem is beyond fixing and if it would be better for you to get a new garage door.

Cornwell Door Service Can Help Fix Your Garage Door Problems or Install a New One

For the past four decades, Cornwell Door Service has been serving the automatic door needs of the south-central Pennsylvania area. A family-owned business, we rely on solid customer relationships and we treat each customer with the individual attention they deserve.

Since our founding in 1972, we’ve installed over 130,000 garage doors on residential and commercial buildings. Some of the reasons for that track record of success include our fair prices, the quality of the work we do, and the excellent service each of our customers receive.

Whether you’re talking to one of our management team, our customer service personnel or one of our installers, we promise you will receive the very best service until you are completely satisfied.

You can call us at 800-820-9841, or you can request an estimate, and a member of our experienced team will get back to you as soon as possible. If you’re already a customer and you want to schedule an appointment, visit our scheduling page so we can determine how we can help you and when we can visit you. We look forward to assisting you with your garage door issues.

Why Your Garage Door Springs Need to Be Replaced

You finally did it — you renovated your house to get it to look the way you want. New windows, new gardening and a new garage door complement the colors and exterior façade of your house. But before you get everything all cleared away and call it a job well done, you should check in and consider replacing one small but crucial element: your garage door springs.

Why You Should Replace Your Garage Door Springs

Garage door springs are the force and mechanical energy responsible for lifting and lowering your garage door. You may think the motorized part of your automatic door does all the work, but it’s these springs that keep and distribute the tension. Without fully functioning springs, your garage door might not move at all and can get stuck, causing multiple safety concerns.

Here’s a fact about garage door springs: they need replacing about every seven years. A typical garage door spring will last about 10,000 cycles of lifting and lowering. If you consider that you probably open and close your garage door four times a day as you leave and return, those cycles can last about seven years.

However, with more and more people using garage doors as the main entry into their houses, it’s possible you’ll need a garage door replacement spring after just four years.

The Signs Your Garage Door Spring Needs to Be Replaced

Giving a thorough glance at the tension spring connected to your garage door will provide the information you need to determine if you require a replacement spring. Here are some common issues to look for:

• Loud or screeching noises — Unfamiliar noises can be more than a motor issue.
• An uneven door when lifting or lowering — If your door tilts at a slant, your spring needs to be rebalanced.
• Physical door damage — A substantial impact, such as hitting the garage door with your car, could knock your spring askew and cause an uneven lift.
• Rust and corrosion — Rust buildup will wear down the efficiency of the spring’s tension.
• Stretched-out spring coil — Gaps of two inches or more in a spring are evidence that your spring has gone through wear and tear and won’t perform accurately.

If you notice any of these issues from your overview, contact a professional immediately for garage door replacement spring service.

Allow a Professional to Replace Your Garage Door Springs

A professional technician and repair worker understands the tension, force and energy that can radiate from a functioning tension spring. When one breaks, the danger of loosening and replacing it increases. Rather than risk personal injury, a call to a certified and knowledgeable technician will save you a lot of money and time.

If you think your garage door spring may soon need replacing, contact Cornwell Door Service to schedule an appointment to replace your broken spring. We also encourage you to check out our 21-point preventative maintenance service, which provides you with an annual tune-up and a complete inspection of your entire garage door setup. Call us today at 717-273-9841!