Things To Check Before You Have Your Garage Door Opener Replaced
Coming home to find that your garage door opener is not working is not a fun thing at all. However, before you call the repair technician to have it replaced, you will want to do a little trouble shooting. This way, you will be able to determine if it really needs to be replaced or not. Here are some of the things you will want to get started with.
Check For A Layer Of Dirt
Your garage door opener will have a sensor that sits above the garage door on the outside. This sensor can become covered in dirt and dust. If that layer of dirt or dust becomes excessively thick, it can prevent the sensor from working properly. Take a clean, soft rag and carefully clean off the outside of the sensor cover. If this were the problem, this would take care of it.
Check For Loose Wires
Occasionally, the wires that go into the garage door opener can come loose and actually become disconnected. This usually happens because the wires were accidentally pulled on or because they wiggled loose from an excessive amount of vibration. Either way, if the wires are completely disconnected, you might want to make sure that you are doing your best to have a garage repair technician or an electrician to reconnect them for you. This will ensure that the wires are put back in correctly, so the opener works well again, and you are not putting yourself at risk for electrical shock.
Check For Dead Batteries
Too many people find that they focus on the chance that the garage door opener could be ruined before checking for the smallest possible issue, which would be that the batteries in the remote are dead. This is something that you will want to check, even if you have just recently replaced the batteries. The reason is that, just like anything else that you buy, some new batteries can come off of the factory line a little less than perfect. They might not have had as much power in them as they should have had and therefore will die sooner than expected.
If all else fails, you will want to go ahead and contact a garage door opener repair technician. He or she will be able to further troubleshoot the problem to determine if it can be fixed or if the entire unit will need to be replaced.
