About a year ago I drove into my driveway after a full day at work and found my garage door open. Immediately I assumed the worst and my heart skipped a beat. For those of you who don’t know, I keep a lot of stuff in my garage including easily a couple thousand dollars worth of tools, so finding my garage wide open was very troubling. Thankfully all of my stuff was still inside but I was very troubled. It wasn’t clear why the garage was open or who might be responsible for it.
A couple days later while at home I heard my garage door opener kick on all by itself and suddenly it all made sense. While I can’t rule out the possibility of interference from a neighbors garage door, it seems most likely that the unit was just reaching the end of its life and that this would be its failure mode. So I decided to simply unplug the unit and pull the disconnect to allow for manual opening.
While manually opening my garage door is not the most convenient, it’s far from an arduous task. It is also not secure, but I figured that if someone was really trying to break into my place there are a number of more traditional ways that are just as easy.
With the problem gone (my garage was no longer opening itself up), I was in no hurry to replace the unit. That was until last weekend when I thought about it and realized that it would be stupid to wait any longer. In fact it was research into Ryobi cordless tools that made me stumble upon their new garage door opener which made me think about it in the first place. Their unit is really nice and I would love to have purchased it, but considering the limited time I’m planning on being here for it wasn’t worth the investment.
At Home Depot I was happy to see that they have a builder-quality opener for just 104 dollars, so I promptly pick it up and brought it home.
Compared to the old motor this one is certainly a bobby dazzler, but more important the mounting system is identical to the old motor. Amazingly, the whole installation took a half hour and involved just a few bolts.
Now the only question left is what to do with the extra parts I have (since I didn’t need the chain or rail since they were already in place from the old unit.