As I stretch a 2 hour project into three blog posts,  I finally get to talk about the opener that we choose.  I looked at a couple of reviews, and decided to get the 1/2 HP Chain drive Chamberlain.  It was also the cheapest one that Lowes had.  Since we have a non-insulated plain steel door, its quite light and doesn’t need a big motor.  The bigger motors also supposedly go a bit faster, but I’ve never been annoyed by how slow the old one was so I saw no need for it to go faster.   The more expensive openers also use different drive methods, either screws or belts instead of chains.   Chain drive is the loudest of those, but I actually like a loud opener as it lets me know when Jess comes home.   We got a Chamberlain after hearing that they had excellent instructions, which I  concur with  as they were extremely easy to follow.  All in all we are quite happy with it, and hopefully it will last much logner than the old one did.

The installation of the new garage door opener was pretty straight forward.  The Chamberlain opener we got came with some great instructions.  So while I was busy removing the old one, Jess was able to assemble the new one.   With just a bit of help from me, she had it all put together, and then all I had to do was bolt it to the ceiling.  The only thing that remained to do was the irritating saftey eye that stops the door from closing if anything runs in front of it.  I’m assuming this is a law, because the  door won’t even work without it installed.  Fortunately they make it very easy to install, or at least it would be if we had the standard size door tracks.  Since we didn’t it was a bit harder, but still not difficult.    Running the wires was the most difficult part of the whole install.  All told it took about an hour to put up.

The opener for Jess’s garage door had problems almost as soon as we moved in.  Despite not being that old, the Stanley opener stopped working just a few weeks after we bought the house.  When it was activiated, the light would just start blinking, instead of  opening. I was feeling quite poor at that point and didn’t want to replace the whole thing,  so after talkign to my dad and a few other knowledgeable folks, the consesnous was that the starter capacitor for the motor had gone.   Checking Ebay, I found a replacement for 8 bucks, and swapped it out.  Happily this fixed the problem and everything was fine for a year or so.

Then the door would hit the ground, and attempt to keep going, making a loud banging noise, and shaking everythign violently.  I adjusted the stops, and that fixed the problem, for awhile anyway.  A few weeks later it happened again, and after lookign a little more closely, I realized that the stops were borken, and wouldn’t hold their position.  In addition, the switch that was supposed to stop the door if the load got to high was also broken.    After futzing with it a few more times I finally decided to replace it.