what you need to know when buying a garage door

3 Things To Check When Your Garage Door Stops Working

There are different kinds of garage door openers. One kind is a chain driven opener. These openers use a chain similar to a bicycle chain to open the door. The chain runs over sprockets inside the motor which causes the motor to pull up the door. What can you do if your chain driven garage door opener stops working?

Check Your Remote

The first thing you can do is the simplest thing to check and the simplest thing to fix. Check the batteries in your remote. There are a lot of things which can affect the lifespan of those batteries, including temperature. Switch other the batteries for new ones and see if that doesn't fix the problem. If that does fix the problem, great, but if it doesn't then you need to start checking out other causes. 

Check Your Breaker Box

Your garage door opener may be hardwired into your house's electrical system. Even if it isn't, the opener will still be attached to the power system somehow, and that means that a problem at the circuit breaker can cause it to stop working. Go to your breaker box and see if any of the breakers have been tripped. If one has, just flip it back on and then see if your garage door opens. 

Check the Chain

The chain needs to be at a certain tension in order to work correctly. That way each link in the chain meets the sprockets when they should, and the motor works. However, even the best installed chain driven garage door opener is still going to have problems with tension. The most common problem is that the chain gets loose. This happens because of the vibrations in the motor. If you shake anything enough times, it will get loose.

The fix for this is fairly easy, but it does take some time. What you need to do is to get up and tighten all the connections. Before you do this, it's really important to make sure that you turn the opener off at the breaker box. You don't want to run the risk of the garage door opener switching on when you have your fingers inside the machine. That can result in losing a couple of fingers. 

If you have tried everything you can think off, it's time to turn to professional help through a company like Spring King Garage Door Repair. Have the company who installed your garage door or opener come out and look to see what the problem is. They should be able to get your garage door opening with no problems.