Garage Door Opener Won't Stay Down / Up ? DIY FIX

so recently my garage door opener started malfunctioning and I spent about a week trying to track down the problem it's where the thing apart basically traced all the leads on the circuit board tested relays check capacitors checked everything visually and I was completely stumped to the point where I was shopping for a new garage door opener I actually got kind of excited because I saw Ryobi makes one that is awesome I later found out that they no longer sell it however you can't find them on eBay in various places apparently there was a lawsuit with Chamberlayne who's like basically makes all the other garage door repairs on the market they sued ryobi and ryona was forced to stop selling it which is disappointing and it's basically stifling innovation in the garage door industry and I a little bit of a bitter about that however I did fix my garage door opener I've laid this unit it's a it's a craftsman garage door opener that bought from Sears however I believe it was made by Chamberlayne because I think they make just about all the garage door openers out there for various companies so this fix will apply to like a Sears Craftsman garage door opener but probably Chamberlayne as well and other makes and models because I think they use all the same parts and from researching online this seems like a pretty common problem however it manifests itself in different ways my particular case it wasn't visually obvious what was going on and I'll get into that and show you how to test for that in a moment but real quick I basically learned overnight I got a master's degree in garage door openers it's kind of funny I called so I called Sears general support and I had somebody try to sell me vinyl siding an air conditioner for my house a roof a kitchen or a bathroom remodel but they couldn't do anything in terms of helping me with my garage door but they couldn't even they couldn't even schedule somebody to come out and look at it or tell me how much it would cost for somebody to come out and look at it I eventually did find a number a craftsman tech support number where I did talk to somebody who did try to help and they they have generally really good customer service however she told me at this point I no more background Taurus then she does it actually kind of jokingly offered me a job so I'm gonna give you just a quick overview I've got a little bit more of an appreciation for how much is going on with a garage door opener primarily a lot of this has to do with safety but there are a lot of inputs going into this so just really quickly kind of here in the center I drew a box this is your garage door opener from an input standpoint I marked them all in red you have your basic wall switch which is wired in my case I think on the newer ones it's more likely Wireless but the older ones is wired you also have this little brake beam infrared sensors here to detect if anything is under the door when it's shutting those are wired in as well and then you have on in my case the right side of the garage door opener if you're standing at the garage door opening is the travel limit adjustment screws so there's an optional in it down travel of an adjustment and then on the left side of the garage door opener are the force opening and closing force adjustment screws and then right here I marked this is just a little antenna so you have an antenna which is basically taking inputs from like a garage keypad your car garage door openers etc and then the last input which surprised me is there's an RPM or a speed sensor on the motor itself so you're basically logic board is monitoring the garage door speed or not the speed of the garage door the speed of the motor itself and I believe that's how it's actually doing the force settings because basically it's in my case anyway it's an AC motor it has one speed there's not really force control but what it's doing is it's looking at the speed and seeing hey is slowing down which must mean there's a heavier load on it and depending on where you set these screws that threshold or when it stops or reverses changes so that's a real quick overview of the inputs of the garage door opener so in my case the problem was when I shut the garage door it would go all the way down completely closed and then it would pause for a brief second and then it would reverse and open all the way up again so basically it wouldn't stay down now when this happens started happening when there were like radical temperature changes like 50 60 degrees from one day to another so I thought okay just a little setting adjust the screws on the right side the the travel limit screws for the down and it seemed to fix it the first couple times then all the sudden it stopped fixing it and I turned it nothing happened still went down reverse turning some more turn some more it got to the point where I had turned it like multiple terms and then all of a sudden it would go down it would close like two feet off the ground so clearly the the travel limit adjustment wasn't working properly and that all sudden would work so it was intermittent which made it really difficult to to troubleshoot so I did some research online and the most common cause of that particular problem is related to the wires on this switch assembly so there are three wires coming from it one for the up limit one for the down limit and then like a central ground common wire and if any of those come off or damaged it'll stop working properly or stop working all together so basically what was happening is the down limit wasn't registering so the ground sure would close until it got all the way closed but then it would continue to try to close and it would trigger the the safety reverse because the logic board would see that the motor speed went down to zero but it was still trying to close so it would reverse go back up I'm not sure what would happen on the upper limit if it wasn't working properly it went all the way up and it stopped I have a feeling it would probably just stop in place it wouldn't reverse and go back down but I'm not sure I did not test that so from a troubleshooting standpoint I removed the covers so remove the side cover and then remove the metal center kind of clamshell and I left the other side cover with the force adjustment switches and all the wires the inputs coming to it on for the time being because you can see everything you need to in terms of the travel limit mechanism on the right side of the machine so did a visual inspection open and close the door while I was watching make sure everything looked fine and it did there were no wires disconnected you need to just follow the little leads up it goes around behind the behind a motor assembly to the logic board plugs in just make sure there's not a break I did find that my wires were resting on the gear itself they were covered in grease so I thought at first maybe there was a problem with the wires they've gotten frayed or broken from just friction there but that wasn't the case it's just a terrible design so double-check that make sure that they're not actually resting on any moving parts because that's not particularly good Oh a note definitely something something to just a disclaimer here if you're opening this up be careful because they're they're hot leads inside of the machine going to the light bulbs various other things there's some low voltage stuff but there's also some higher voltage stuff so don't stick your hand in there there's also moving parts I mean the thing opens and closes garage doors there's gears there mechanical things that move you could probably hurt yourself if you're not careful so when you are poking around in there keep your hands clear pay attention to what you're doing stay focused just be careful if you need to work or unhook right wires on the inside unplug the machine first there's also a really big capacitor if it's an AC motor which in my case it was it probably is in a lot of cases so don't assume that everything's safe even if you unplug it that capacitor might have a residual charge so don't don't just grab it with your bare hands or touch the leads unless you're just being very careful so wear gloves in that case maybe but just be careful in general even if it's unplugged okay you never know we could have tension on it there's a million things that can go wrong so just take your time be careful in general this switch here you can see it and you can work with it without having to get near any moving parts or anything that might have a higher voltage but just be careful so if if you inspect this the switch or this mechanism and the wires are intact they're not falling off they haven't broke and it seems like they have a good connection the next thing to do is to ensure that there's not an internal break and that's what essentially it turned out to be for me is inside of the insulation the wires that just started to break apart and it was intermittent so as this little trolley traveled back and forth it was pulling the stretching this wire and bending it in that that bend had become weak over time so as it got towards the the lower limit for the closed limit on the switch it was pulling that wire out and all sudden it would lose it would lose its connectivity it would no longer register when it touched the low limit switch it would keep trying to close however when it was in the up position it was making a connection so it took me a while to to realize this and ultimately the test that I used to determine that there was a wiring problem in that harness was I hooked a lead to the the central kind of the ground wire and then the closed limit wire and I hope those two my voltmeter multimeter turned it to DC I could see that there was five volts there but then as the garage door closed that would start to fluctuate it would drop down sometimes I'd say three to zero it would be all over the place and that's their life that was basically the problem right there so there was a problem with with one of those wires to determine which one I remove the lead from the lower limits which she moved it over to the upper limits which so then I had a basically of reading the difference between the center one on the trolley and IBEW limit switch and I saw the same thing so that basically told me that it was the common one in between them that was causing the issue and it made perfect sense because that's the one that moves so I removed that wiring harness it basically runs from the three wires there's a yellow yellow brown and gray I believe but you'll see in the video what they are they run from this switch around the back of the machine up past the main kind of drive gear for the opener in this case they were just laying on that which is ridiculous they come over to the logic board where the yellow and the brown one went into a plug into the logic board the gray wouldn't had a little loop and then it came up and around and went to the plug on the motor speed sensor where it terminated but then a new gray one started from a different pin on the plug and went back to the logic board so basically that wiring harness has two white plugs and then three wires that come off of them that have these little Spade connectors that plug onto the switch once I did remove the wiring harness I was able to use my multimeter and check for continuity and just move it a little bit and I could clearly see that there is an issue because it was breaking continuity just with a little bit of movement on the table I took a video of that as well now I did look at the parts diagram and the switch does not include the wiring harness there is a wiring harness listed however I contacted seals sears PartsDirect and they could not tell me if the wiring harness or if that part number was the wiring harness I am me I actually need it because it wasn't pictured in their parts diagram there wasn't a picture of the harness itself that really wasn't a description basically they list two wiring harnesses one high voltage one non I'm assuming it's the non high voltage wiring harness but they couldn't confirm it so I decided to just repair it myself rather than order one they did try to once again schedule somebody to come out and look at it and at that point I just told no thanks so basically I repaired the wiring harness I just replaced that gray wire with a piece of 22 gauge standard kind of braided wire I went all the way to the plug that goes on the speed sensor for the motor got within an inch or two of their cut it soldered and he went on put some shrink tube around it and then ran it back the same route is it tying it all the way and then I didn't zip tie it up a little bit higher so it wasn't resting on the on the gear for the motor brought it back down here and then I love to kind of a bigger loop on this side I figured bigger loop it'll kind of spread out the the stress of the movement it hopefully will last more than nine or ten years this time I'll never have to mess with it again we will see one thing to keep in mind if you do like a bigger loop like I did when you put this into peace back on just pay special attention to how it's fitting on and make sure you're not going to pinch that wire at all it kind of like you run the garage you're up and down a couple times make sure it's not going to get pulled off or interfere with the movement of the assembly or anything like that and you should be good to go feel free to post any questions you have in the the comment section I appreciate if you like and subscribe I hope this I hope this video helps you out I hope it saves you $150 you don't have to go out to buy a new garage door opener you just replace a wire and you're good to go that is it until next time quick note here when you're reassembling there's actually three different types of screws that hold kind of outer housing and the various pieces on there is like a machine screw with a washer machine screw that doesn't have a washer and then more of like a of course pointed type screw so I'd not take too much note about which ones went where but I am deducing and kind of piecing it together so basically I think the machine screw with the washer holds the plastic outer shells on at the top the machine screw without a washer holds the actual the metal housing on at the top and then the screw here at the point and where the coarse thread goes through the the plastic piece on the lower holes that actually corresponds with the the holes at the bottom here on the metal outer housing so the more coarse ones with the point go through these little plastic retainers the machine screws without the washer go through this metal housing here and I'm guessing just based on the indentations here you can kind of see it looks like they correspond with the inside of that screw so that's where the different screws go I don't know that it's that big of a deal you probably get by swapping these two on the right those guys I think are gonna be specific to the lower part of the plastic pieces that go through the metal white retainers

Channel: charlieaf92

Views: 180,744

Keywords: craftsman, chamberlain, garage door, garage door openers, garage door opens, garage door wont stay down

Id: 0hW-j27nNd4

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 21 2018