<p>The door is sectional. Pretty wide about 7 feet tall, one door for a two car garage. The springs are not broken.</p>
<p>I just repaired my garage door opener two weeks ago. Same symptoms. Unplug (de-energize) the opener. Remove the cover screws/bolts and then slide the cover off. It should be readily apparent if the gear is worn out. There will be white nylon shavings everywhere inside the cover. If your opener is only 15 years old, the parts are available online and should run you about $25. I would recommend replacing the spur gear, shaft and sprocket as one assembly rather than buying the gear kit. You can replace the spur gear by itself, but it will require use of a 5/32" punch ($12 at Sears) so having to buy the tool will raise the price of the repair above the cost of the whole assembly. There are websites that have step by step instructions with photos of the entire process. Of course, if you aren’t very handy then you would probably be more comfortable hiring someone. Removal and reinstallation of the opener is a two person task, do you have a mechanically inclined friend or neighbor to help? The entire process took me about 3 hours, but that included a lot of cleaning.</p>
<p>ONLY 15 years? That sounds promising. I’ll try repairs before giving it up.</p>
<p>I work in maintenance, so 15 years doesn’t seem very old to me. When I worked for a tire manufacturer, I went to Japan to benchmark some of their maintenance processes. I was at a meeting where the leadership team wanted the maintenance tech to explain to them why a motor shaft had broken after only 50 years of operation. It is a totally different mindset, and it is very frustrating to live in a throw-away mentality society.</p>
<p>Actually, I contacted all the garage door people in the area to get it repaired. They refused to touch. Getting a new opener with increased horse power. There it goes.</p>
<p>Iglooo- You made my day. The liability on these things is huge. Your garage door is the heaviest moving object in your home. The GDO installers/dealers should really NOT be repairing models this old. You would not believe the tragic cases I handled involving older operators and doors. Excellent. Enjoy your new opener.</p>
<p>Not yet. The cold weather is busting many garage door openers. The earliest I can get was next Monady. In the meantime, the door remains shut.</p>
<p>MOWC: you’ll be pleased to know that when I had the garage door people out to do service last week, they checked the auto-stop twice and also gave me a lecture on why I should check it at least once a month.</p>
<p>I would bet the percentage of people who check their garage door opener safety switches on a monthly basis is real, real close to zero.</p>
<p>^^ Correct. Usually they are “checked” by a cat running out under a closing door, which, hopefully, goes back up!</p>
<p>When the photocells first came out, irate consumers demanded that they be mounted on TOP of the GDO (opener) instead of on the bottom of the door frame so they would not be in the way or cause maintenance issues.</p>
<p>I actually use my photo sensors purposely to prevent the door from closing when I don’t want it to - ex: if I have a car part way in the garage for a period of time for some reason and don’t want someone to close the door by hitting the button or a remote. I place an object in the path of the sensor and confirm by the blinking LED that it’s breaking the path. I know - ideally I’d unplug the opener but that’s a pain and this actually works pretty well.</p>