Over the last couple years, we’ve had some issues with our garage door and opener opener. One of the remotes will only last a week on a new battery, the remote keypad stopped working and the service company speculated that the logic board in the overhead unit was likely going bad. Getting someone to come out and look at the thing was going to cost more than a brand new opener, so I opted for the new one.

Besides doing my normal on-line research, I called up the contractor that finished our basement last summer and asked him for some advice as well. After all this, I decided to go with a “screw drive” mechanism for reliability instead of the “belt drive” I’d initially been interested in because of how quiet it is.

I picked up an Overhead Door “Power Max” model at Lowes rather than the Genie equivelent because it has a lifetime parts guarentee. I can’t find the model online, but I think it’s similar to this one. The new opener is much faster and is noticably more quiet than the old chain drive opener.

Normally I’d have opted for the $60 installation service Lowes offers, but my folks are in town this weekend and my dad and I thought it would be a fun do-it-yourself project; so that’s what we did.

The instructions were rather long and a little scary, but we managed to take down the old one and put up the new one in a couple of hours without any real issues. And I now have a much better understanding of how a garage door opener works. 🙂