Question:
My Genie opener appears to have quit. No light at the wall
pushbutton, no lights on the sensors at the door, won't open or close,
of course. Power at the outlet---I checked. Similar action about a
week ago; I opened up the case and turned the shaft of the motor by
hand (figuring something was stuck), and that brought it back to
life. The nearest repair place is two hours and thirty bucks' worth
of gas away. Any ideas before I go out and buy a new one?
Can anyone help me please?
Answer:
Maybe I didn't word that quite properly & should of said inside of the
cover. Personally i was never able to find the actual short &
inspecting the motor winding wouldn't help at all, but I have seen
that exact problem in Genie openers numerous times and it would never
trip a breaker (they don't have any internal fuses). Since I couldn't
find the short, I can't tell you why the breaker doesn't trip.
The clue is when he spins the screw (thus the motor winding turns) the
opener will start working again for a while until the motor winding
stops again in that one spot.
The motor has a built in thermal overload that the incoming power goes
thru to the rest of the unit, so if the power isn't going thru the
overload it kills power to the entire unit & thus no lights will come
on & the opener does not make a sound.
I can tell you from experience that you can change any other part in
the opener as many times as you want but the problem will never go
away completely until you change the motor winding & once the winding
is changed the problem does not re-occur. The difficult part in
troubleshooting it is that the problem is intermittent (any minor
movement of the winding & the problem will disappear & may not come
back for days) & that you can't see the winding while the opener is
operational.
He asked for advice and I gave him mine from experience of working on
hundreds of these openers since 1978 (did full time service from then
until the late 90's) & others are certainly free to offer any
suggestions or ideas that come to their mind.
