5 things NOT to do with your garage door

1. Don’t make any changes, adjustments, manipulate any settings at all on the opener without recording their current values and being able to put them back to the original settings.  In delicate manipulation and adjustment, it is often useful to be able to undo.  Keep the ability to undo by noting the original settings for everything.  Take photos if necessary.  Make 1 adjustment, and test the result.  If you do not get the expected result, reset the adjustment.

2. Don’t re-engineer the door if part of it is broken.  Fix the broken part.  If you think you need to re-engineer the door, stop and consider the various parts of the system again.  If the door WAS working, but now it is NOT working, something changed.  The door does not need to be re-imagined.  It needs a small adjustment.

3.  Don’t call a Garage Door place at random off google or the yellow pages without being prepared to kindly and politely decline to buy a new door, new opener, new house.  The opener you have is not an antique (unless it is of course).  The door you have can be opened (it worked yesterday).  If they can’t look at it, determine what is wrong, and adjust it so that it works, thank them for coming and call the next random place.

4. Don’t ignore the garage door until it STOPS working. While it is working properly, keep the tracks clean, oil the hinges, keep dust and dirt out of the mechanism.  A clean and well oiled mechanism does not have to work as hard.  This leads to longer periods between stoppages.

5. Don’t work on the door at all until you have re-read the manual, and reached a sense of the zen of the whole garage door system.  Garage doors are very simple, and hideously complex.  If you assume that the door is easy to fix and jump right in to fixing without understanding what has gone wrong and is out of tune, you will become lost on the path to proper Garage Door operation.

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