Since I was already buying parts to fix the garage door opener (See below), I decided to also buy an external keypad to open and close the garage from the outside and it was on sale.. Bonus! The install was really easy and did not take a rocket scientist to program it to work with the garage door opener.

Last Friday when I got home I opened the garage door like I normally do as I pull into the driveway and it started to go up like expected but when it got to about 1/3 open the door came crashing down. It turned out the carriage, that is hooked to the door and rides along the track, lost just about all of its teeth and could no longer support the weight of the door (This is a screw drive garage door opener by the way). It would seem that the teeth on the carriage are made of a hard plastic or similar and over time the teeth just broke off or got worn down.

Thinking that this would be a common part I went to Home Depot and Lowes just to find out they don’t carry replacement parts so I turned to the Internet and ordered the parts I needed. The parts came in yesterday and I installed them today. It looks like Genie figured out that making the teeth out of plastic was not smart being that the new part has metal teeth. It was a pretty simple repair and now I don’t have to manually open the door anymore.