Your garage door opener plays a critical role in the convenient use of your garage on a daily basis.  Like many things associated with garage doors, you often don’t think twice about the opener (or operator, as it is called in the industry) - until it stops working properly.  Because it’s a mechanical device, all garage door openers will eventually stop working properly. The typical life expectancy of a garage door opener is anywhere from 10 to 20 years, as long as the door itself is kept in decent working order.

When a garage door stops working, it’s common for people to assume that it’s the opener itself that is the problem.  While this might be the case, it isn’t always true.  

While a garage door can weigh hundreds of pounds, it isn’t actually the motor that should be doing the heavy lifting.  Instead, it is the spring system that is the ‘muscle’ to move the door and the motor just moves things along. Kind of like working a jack on a car when you need to change a tire; your arm is moving the jack, but not actually lifting the weight of the car.  

That being said, if there are problems with your garage door, like a broken spring or old, creaky parts that provide a lot of resistance to the door opening and closing easily, then the motor has to work extra hard.  In such cases, you can expect the lifespan of your garage door opener to be much shorter than expected as various parts inside will wear out faster than normal.

Garage Door Opener - Knowing What Can Be Fixed (and How), and When to Replace the Old with the New

There are a number of different manufacturers of garage door openers on the market, but most people are familiar with 3 main brands; LiftMaster, Craftsman and Genie.  

Craftsman is the parent company of LiftMaster, with Craftsman being the ‘consumer’ or ‘retail’ arm that you might find at Home Depot.  LiftMaster is the considerably more sturdy, professional version. While they are both excellent products, we only carry LiftMaster because we can confidently stand behind it after having installed literally thousands of these openers over the years. 

Genie, on the other hand, is not a brand we personally recommend.  We find them in quite a few homes as they tend to be a bit less expensive, but like so many things, you get what you pay for.  We prefer to provide a product that won’t require us to return time and time again to repair or replace, just to save a few bucks.  

While we only offer LiftMaster openers, we do offer customers a choice.  We carry both chain drive motors for the more economically minded customer as well as the super quiet belt drive option.  Both will give you years of reliable service and both come with wifi enabled options so that you can connect your smartphone to your opener with an app.  

This technology is quite handy as it allows you to quickly check on your phone from anywhere whether your garage door is open or closed, and how long it has been that way. (Have you ever left home and suddenly wondered whether or not you remembered to close the garage?  Now you don’t need to waste time turning around and going home to check! Just a quick peek at your phone and you’ll know. And if you did leave it open, you can close it right from your phone, no matter where you are.  Pretty cool, right?)

Another nice benefit of this remote technology is that you can let someone in to your house remotely.  For example, if someone wanted to borrow your golf clubs but you weren’t going to be home to hand them over, you could tell them to call you when they arrive, and you could open the door for them, then once they retrieved the clubs, you could close the door and secure your home again.  

And finally, Amazon is rolling out an integration with this app so that, if you choose to, you can have them leave packages inside your garage for you.  No more worrying about porch pirates stealing your packages!