LESLIE: Carol in Texas is calling with a garage door issue. What’s going on at your money pit?
CAROL: Well, whenever we try to put the garage door down, sometimes it goes all the way down, from the remote control in our car or the transmitter in our – on the wall in the garage. And sometimes it intermittently – it will go down a little bit, stop, try to go back up; we have to punch the button, it’ll go down a little bit, stop and it sometimes takes three or four times to get it down.
TOM: Well, what’s happening there is that’s actually the safety reverse feature kicking on.
LESLIE: There’s got to be something blocking it.
TOM: It’s feeling some resistance and it could be just a matter of it needing to be lubricated. Because if it gets a little dry and it gets a little too much resistance, what’s happening is the garage door thinks it’s being blocked; it thinks that something is stuck under it and, when that happens, it backs up. And so if you were to lubricate it or adjust it so that it closes freely and easily, that’s probably going to stop happening.
What I would do is I would disconnect the garage door opener – there’s usually a safety cord that you can pull and unleash it, unlatch it –
CAROL: Right.
TOM: – run it up and down by hand a few times; get some grease, put it in the tracks, put in on the wheels, work it in really nicely so it flows smoothly, closes smoothly; then reconnect it, run it up and down a couple of times more and see what happens.
CAROL: OK. Only problem is we have lubricated it quite a few times with a special lubrication we found even at like Home Depot or Lowe’s or one of those places. But …
TOM: Alright, so if it’s not the lubrication, then the next thing is I wonder if something is out of alignment. It could be that the tracks are shifted or moved, because something is causing this to resist going down.
LESLIE: Which is why it’s sensing it.
TOM: Maybe you have a bad bearing in one of the rollers. There’s resistance somewhere that’s causing the garage door opener to think it’s being obstructed and that’s why it backs up. We’ve got to figure out why it’s being – why it’s resisting and then address that to repair it.
CAROL: OK.
TOM: So look a little deeper but you’re on the right track.
CAROL: Alright, we’ll give it a try. Take it off manually and make it move up and down …
TOM: Right, you might feel where it’s a little bit rough in one spot and you might say, “Why is that happening?” and find out that the track – maybe one of the bolts in the track came loose. That happens because they take a lot of abuse.
CAROL: Oh, definitely. OK. We’ll try that and I certainly appreciate you taking my call.
TOM: You’re very welcome. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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