I decided it was time to add another fine luxury feature to the workshop – a garage door opener! I’ve been wanting one for years and decided it was finally time. I’ve installed garage door openers before, so this should be simple. Right?
If you have followed this little journey at all you know that nothing is ever simple…
The workshop door is huge – 8′ high by 18′ wide. A fully insulated, reinforced model that is heavy. Unlike regular garage doors it is a jackshaft style which uses a shaft with torsion springs mounted directly above the door going side to side. This style is common for large doors and commercial doors. It requires a completely different style of opener than regular garage doors.
Of course the special complexity I create for myself doesn’t stop here. Planning ahead for the lift, I had the garage door tracks mounted as close to the ceiling as possible. Recall that the workshop has a cathedral ceiling – mounting the tracks as high as possible puts them almost touching the sloping ceiling on the side.
Jackshaft garage door openers attach directly to the end of the shaft – they stick out to the side and mostly hang below the shaft.
The jackshaft openers are pretty narrow from side to side. Maybe it will (just barely) fit? Order an opener and find out.
Pull the new opener out of the box and try it. Does it fit? Not even close. Krud.
Leaves me with three options: 1: Give up on the idea. This is actually the most reasonable approach… 2: Cut a hole in the ceiling. This would be a lot of work to patch. And recall that there is a foot of blown in insulation in the attic that would love to fall out. 3: Order the low clearance adapter I had already researched now that I had proven that it was needed.
This adapter is a couple of sprockets and a length of bicycle chain that drops the garage door opener down about six inches. With the adapter in hand open up the boxes and arrange the parts in the order of use. Study the installation guide.
Discover that there is no installation guide in the box. There is no installation guide online. There is, however, an installation video.
Play the installation video. Play the installation video a couple of times. Go back and replay the first couple of steps and quickly move to the workshop before I forget them.
In normal installation the opener slides over the end of the shaft. The shaft supports the opener and a single bracket secures the bottom of the opener to the wall. At this point I should mention that the opener is quite heavy.
It is also worth noting that these openers are normally installed about six or seven feet high. Mine is at 12 feet. In an already crowded corner of the workshop.
Attempt to follow the instructions. Discover that hanging the opener off of the chain and sprocket is much harder than sliding it over the shaft. You need to dangle it from the chain and secure at least one of the brackets that fasten it to the wall to keep it from falling. A job that requires at least three hands…
After an extended period of wrestling the dangling opener from the top of the (tall) ladder I finally had it “secured”.
Next was wiring up the pushbutton, the sensors, and the automatic lock. Having experience in this area I initially did rough wiring – first make sure everything works and then make the wiring neat!
With the wiring connected the last step was to plug the opener in to the electrical outlet I had conveniently installed high on the wall several years ago in anticipation of an opener and start the configuration process.
The good news is that the door went up and down. The bad news is that the opener was vibrating and shaking badly with jerky movement of the door. And the door wasn’t going down all the way – it would get close to all the way down and then reverse and go back up.
After basic troubleshooting failed I determined three things: 1: It was hot. 2: I was completely beat. 3: It was clearly time to pull the emergency release, manually lower the door, and head inside for the day before bad things happened.