I let the Genie of its box

Now that my garage door was adjusted properly (it wasn’t parking in all spots), I decided to install my Genie garage door opener that I had bought earlier this year. Enlisting the help of my friend Chuck, who was the one who put me onto the Genie Excelerator opener, we set off with the installation after treating him to breakfast at Royal Oak (gotta love cheap labour).

Overall, the installation isn’t too difficult but took quite a bit of time. One of the challenges was that the garage door seems to open up at a very high level. So we would have to use the maximum length for the arm to attach to the garage door. We thought that maybe I would have to extend it but in the end it wasn’t required. The other challenge was reinforcing the top section of the garage door. There aren’t really any clear instructions on how to do that in the manual. My garage door being an insulated one is different from Chuck’s and my brother’s so I couldn’t use the same way to reinforce. In the end, I connected 3 angled-type braces across the top of the garage and then got another piece of bracket to mount vertically down the center of the top section. I bolted all the brackets down and is pretty solid.

The final piece is running the wiring for the sensors and wall control and it was ready to go. I did a few fine tuning adjustments and it all works. As advertised, it does open very quickly (claim is twice the speed). It does create a bit more noise because of the garage door rollers moving faster along the track. I also noticed that the rollers installed on my garage door are the nylon ones instead of metal so that will help with noise reduction. Inside the house, you basically hear the noise from the garage door rather than the opener itself. My neighbor has a chain-drive opener and you can hear the hum from the machine. So installation took maybe 5 hours total but with a break in between and a Home Depot run to buy more brackets. Chuck was only there for a couple of hours and had left after we had mounted the unit onto the ceiling. I did the rest myself. Not too hard of an installation. Probably no more difficult than a chain or belt driven opener although I’ve read how people do not like installing screw-drive openers. Not sure why though. Now that I’m more “experienced”, I’m sure I could cut the installation time to near half.