Opening and closing your garage door should be a positive experience. Originally the garage door opener’s intended purpose was to automatically open and close the garage door when driving your car in or out of the garage. Since then a lot of people use the garage as a storage area for everything except their vehicles leaving no room for the car. Whether you are using your garage for storage or to keep the car safe there may be a time or two that you push the button and it malfunctions.
When the time comes to open your garage door if nothing happens when you push the button there are a few reasons it may not be working. One of the most common garage door opener repairs in Lacey, Aberdeen, and Tumwater are plastic drive gears stripping out inside the unit. When the garage door opener makes a humming noise and nothing moves this is more than likely the problem. Inside the motor housing of some garage door openers there is a worm gear on the motor shaft and another gear on the drive shaft. The drive gear is a white round piece mounted on the sprocket drive shaft typically this gear shows wear and will leave shavings at the bottom of the motor cover once it has worn out. The worm gear is on the motor shaft. This gear will hardly ever show wear but must be replaced at the same time. You can purchase the two gears in a kit or you can get the gear and sprocket assembly that includes the drive shaft with the chain sprocket on top. We always have these garage door opener parts in stock. If you are not close bye we can usually bring them to you.
If your garage door will open normally with the remote, wireless keypad or wall button inside the garage but will only close when the inside wall button is held down until the door is closed there is an issue with the garage door opener safety beams also known as eye beams or photo cells. The eye beams are required to be mounted at the bottom portion of the door no lower than 4” and no lower higher than 6” off the ground. On most eye beams there will be a small led on each of the units. When both led are illuminated and not blinking that indicates the beams are aligned and working properly. If this is the case and your door is not functioning the beams could be vibrating when the door is activated making them come out of alignment for a brief second witch make the opener think something is in the way. Most photos are not extremely sensitive to vibration. If this is happening the beams have probably been moved slightly by someone or something. If only one beam has a led illuminated or one led is blinking this means the eyes are out of alignment and need to be realigned. When realigning the eye beams it is best to have 2 people. Have 1 person at each photo and move the photo around a little bit the led should stay on. If you move it one way and it goes out adjust it the opposite way a little bit. Keep adjusting them until you can slightly move each photo and the led stays on. If the led lights are out on both eyes there are a few possibilities, there is no power to the opener, a problem with the wiring to the eyes, the garage door opener logic board or brain is out. You can trouble shoot these you self or call a company that performs garage door repair. Other company’s the perform garage door opener installation may also be able to do a service call.
This is just a few of the common garage door repairs we run into around Aberdeen, Hoquiam, Tumwater, Olympia, Lacey and surrounding areas.