Belt-Driven Garage Door Opener

[iacas]

My wife's garage door has been acting funny. The safety sensors weren't working, etc. I got new sensors and hooked them directly to the garage door opener, but even they didn't work. I deduced that it was the logic board, and at about $80 or so plus the cost of a service call, I decided to just replace the opener.

So in returning the sensors I wandered back to look at the other openers. There are chain-driven and belt-driven openers (and maybe still screw-driven?), but the belt-driven ones are quieter. Some of them, like the one I bought, is equipped with WiFi.

http://www.lowes.com/pd_737053-38782-LW9000WF___

Installation took about three hours (I went awfully slowly on purpose… a second installation would probably take half the time or less, and taking the old one down was about an hour of that). Heck, I even spent about five or six minutes disconnecting a wire that I thought wouldn't even be necessary, and turned out not to be…

Anyway… the app works well, the remote works well, the keypad works well. The garage door is now very quiet, and… I bought a second one to replace my garage door opener, even though it's working just fine. I'm still not 100% sure I want to replace something that's working just fine, but I don't have an outside keypad and I can't open my garage door from my phone.  So…

We'll see. But for now, my wife likes her new opener, and I like it too.

[mvmac]

5 minutes ago, iacas said:

I'm still not 100% sure I want to replace something that's working just fine, but I don't have an outside keypad and I can't open my garage door from my phone.  

Cool. Definitely something to consider when/if we need to replace ours.

[mchepp]

This is a very interesting discussion. I have a somewhat related problem. I recently bought a new house. It is completely wired with a z-wave system mostly installed with 2Gig components. Really designed to be a "connected" home. Front door, garage door, thermostat all connected and could be controlled by my phone. But to get everything working properly you need to get an alarm.com system which they want to charge me $50 a month for. Way too much for so little. So I dropped it after the free trial. 

Now my thermostat doesn't work, the garage door works mostly with the opener, but sometimes not, and the front door is overkill without working properly. So now I have been working on setting up a system that doesn't require a monthly fee. I got a Vera system. It is very far from reliable but it can control the thermostat at least...mostly.

I now I have begun to wonder what else is out there to improve a connected home. Should I just abandon the z-wave system replace my thermostat and other stuff, and then wait until there are systems that are less buggy, or are there other better systems without a outrageous monthly fee or even better no monthly fee.