Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Is your Racine garage door opener sick or tired?

You can’t expect your Racine garage door opener to raise and lower your garage door with such frequency without it getting a bit worn out by the process. If you go in and out of your garage only once each day of the year, that’s 365 times that the garage door opener will open the door and an equal number of times that it will close the garage door.

Chances are, however, that, while there may be days when you don’t use the garage door, those days are infrequent. Instead, if you’re like most of your Racine neighbors, you probably use the garage door more often than once a day.

Think about it this way; you usually use the garage door five or six days of the week, leaving and returning from work. That means that you use the garage door twice on those days. If you work 250 days out of the year, assuming you have weekends off, you’ll still bring the garage door up and down 500 times.

What about weekends? How often do you go to the store, raising and lowering the garage door to get the car out of the garage? And then you raise and lower the garage door when you return. How about all the times you cut the grass or snow blow the driveway? How about when you garden or rake the leaves? How about all the times you take the recyclables out to the curb? And then there are all those incidental occasions when you have reason to use the garage door opener.

It’s not hard to imagine that your garage door opener will go up and down 1,000 times each year or more. Over a five-year period, that’s 5,000 times. A single-car garage door weighs about 125 pounds. If it’s insulated, the weight can be closer to 150 pounds.

Most folks in Racine have two-and-a-half-sized garages with double-wide doors (16-feet). If made of steel, those doors can weigh about 200 pounds without the insulation. With insulation, they’re often closer to 225 or more pounds.

Garage door openers commonly have ½-horsepower motors. Fortunately, the garage door comes with heavy-duty springs that help to carry much of the load. But we’re still expecting a lot from that garage door opener. They do an admirable job but, over time, it’s inevitable that they grow a little tired. They can get sick, too.

Garage door opener parts can break. Adjustments can slide out of adjustment.

The point is that, if your Racine garage door is getting a little long in the tooth, you may want to have it checked out by a qualified garage door technician. They can identify anything ailing your garage door opener and they can give a boost of energy to many tired garage door openers.




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