How to Adjust Your Garage Door Opener's Travel and Force

Hi, I'm Dan Musick, and today we will show you how to check  a garage door. Basically there are two things that you check   as far as the opener. You want to check the amount  of force that the opener is pushing with, both to close the door and to open the door. If your force  for opening the door is exceptionally strong and a spring   breaks, you can buckle the top of the door. The same thing can happen to a closed door that is set too tight. The   push it goes down hits and actually bends the door  - especially if it is not properly reinforced - and it will wreck the top section. A lot of lot of older  doors have been out there for 10-15 years. They are  no longer made, with some of them having only been out five or six years. If you damage the top section for example, you have to get a whole new door. We want to show you a way to protect your door and also to protect others that may be there; especially if you have children in the area. First  we'll check the amount of lift by opening the door and holding the door, restraining it as it opens. As the door is opening, it stopped pretty easily. Another way to check this is to close the door, I will stand on a scale and check my weight, and as the door is rising, I'll see how much weight I lose. It will tell me how much upward force there is on the scale. That pull dropped me 70 pounds, which means we can back off a little. Notice that the force adjustment on these is set  between high and normal. This is a pretty light door, so I'm going to back it up to the middle of the dial on  both of them. We'll start from that point to   test the force adjustment on the door. So now I'm  going to recheck the upper force of the door. Push this, go back to the scale, and I lost about 25 pounds that  time. I'm going to double-check it. About 25 to 30 pounds. That's a good  amount of force. This is summer, and it's warm. In the winter that adjustment is going to  drop down to about 5 or 10 pounds. Now, if you're   handy and you like doing this sort of thing, you can adjust it even lighter. As a service technician, I like to make sure when I adjust the opener that the customer doesn't have to take another service call when it's cold and the bearings are stiff. So I leave it right on 30 to 35 pounds. Next, I'm going to open it all the way, because that will So I put the scale here. I'm doing something similar here: I'm going to stand on the scale and say how much force this will exert on a standard scale. That was about five pounds. If you have toddlers playing in the garage all the time, you can leave it there. But, if you're a serviceman and you've got a warranty to your work  you've got to tighten it up a little bit. So, I'm   going to adjust both the core force... About five notches on the dial and I'll recheck this. I increased the force on that It gained about thirty or thirty-five pounds. Thirty to thirty-five pounds. That's about as light as you want it to get in the summer. In the winter, you can drop it down to five to ten pounds. But in the summer, just know that in the summer it's going to have about 25 to 30 pounds. Something you want to check on the opener is the travel. You want the   door open all the way. This time we're going  to close the door to see if it closes properly. Also, to adjust the limit, which you often have to  do whenever you make the repair that we've made. Notice that the door doesn't close all the way. For  Chamberlain, LiftMaster and Sears openers, one turn   on the dial will give you two inches of trouble. If  we measure the bottom of the door, we see that we have about an inch... this one is about six inches. I'm going to turn the dial one complete turn on the side  of the opener. To do that, first open the door I just noticed that the door opened properly. It's exactly where it should be. We need to adjust the down travel. On the side of the unit are two screws. The one on the left is the   down adjustment. The one on the right is the up. To increase the travel which is what we want to   do, we're going to adjust the down screw one  complete turn to get two inches of travel. We went around one complete turn on the down adjustment. At this point, we will push the button to check. Perfect.

Channel: DDM Garage Doors, Inc.

Views: 753,749

Keywords: ddmgaragedoors, torsion, part, parts, spring, springs, door, doors, garage, garages, tutorial, tutorials, replace, replacement, repair, repairs, how, how-to, adjust, travel, distance, lift, force, strength, opener, openers, torsion springs, DDM Garage Doors, garage doors, how does, how to, garage door springs

Id: GebkW96Sd_c

Length: 8min 14sec (494 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2012