Burning Down the House

That title might be a bit of an exaggeration. Saturday I was in my garage and I kept smelling this odd strong smell of plastic. Later that afteroon Deborah came in the house from some shopping and said the garage door wouldn't go down. We both went out and looked, I played with the sensors a little, and told her to try it again. She says "hey look there's smoke coming out of the garage door opener". Sure enough there was. I took the cover off the opener so I could look up at it and think "wow, look at all the shiny parts. I wonder what they do" and then had Deborah hit the button again. This time we saw some pretty sparks. Lots of them. And I noticed that the big circuit board had a hole burned right through it. With my vast knowledge of garage door openers I came to the following conclusion: "I think its broke". Growing up we never had a garage door opener (well we did, and its name was Scott) so I figured a few days of opening the door by hand wouldn't kill us. Problem 1 though is that while unlike many new homes, we do actually have a lock on our garage door, but we dont have a key for it. So we wouldn't be able to unlock it without going through the house and into the garage. That just takes too long. And problem 2, apparently todays garage doors aren't intended to take the punishment of opening them by hand. Most only have one spring these days (I've learned that a good garage door has 2 springs, one on each side but todays builders are too cheap) and if you open them by lifting on the side without the spring, they get crooked. And then the cable unwinds. And then instead of watching "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" after church on Sunday night, you're on a stepladder trying to figure out how to lift a crooked door, and how to wind a garage door cable back into its spool. I went another route, I just unhooked the cables and let the door go down...really fast. Oops. No damage done though. Two days later and I became the proud owner of an Overhead Door Legacy garage door opener. It's a premium chain drive opener that features a patented motor for greater lifting force, rugged full-chain drive and solid-steel T-rail for long-lasting performance. And its $100 cheaper than the opener the first guy I called had. Happy Valentine's Day.