In Part 1, we talked about the motor and pump going out on the hot tub. It must be that all things with electric motors have all decided to quit at the same time in my house. First was the hot tub and now the garage door opener is playing around. I installed the current opener about 2 years ago to replace one that I had installed probably 10 or so years before that. I will not mess with changing out the broken springs on the door. A man could get seriously hurt with one of those but there is not a lot of speciality work involved in changing out the openers.

I went into the garage with the intentions of going to the store and as I normally do, pushed the open button before getting in my car. Luckily, I happened to watch the door go up instead of just backing out as the door had stopped at halfway. Repeated attempts at pushing the button only brought about more frustration with the door not opening more than half up.

As with all motorized garage doors, there is a built in safety that always makes it possible to open the door manually as long as neither of the springs are broken. It just take a pull on the release rope to disconnect the door from the motor and the door can be pushed up so I was not really stuck and not able to get the car out.

I went to work on the door adjustments which is where I figured the problem had to be as the tracks were not broken or misaligned. Repeated fiddling with the adjustments only brought about more frustration on my part as the door would either go up with a crash or only go up a little bit or go down and immediately bounce back up. I decided to unhook it and use it manually and leave the thing while I went to Starbucks for a favorite brew. I figured that I needed to get away from it for a bit to lose my frustrations.

I kept it on the manual lifting for a few days and then decided to have another go at adjusting it. This time, I went to a different adjustment panel for the adjustments and lo and behold, got it working properly. A few more tweaks and the door is just like new again. Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch as it is at least a 30 year old door but at least the mechanical door opener is now working properly. I have a button I can push on the visor of my car and I spent several happy minutes just pushing it to make the door go all the way up and then all the way down.

I wonder what is next as these things always come in three’s?