garage door open/close counter

[pete_c]

The Florida home has a raised ceiling (~15) in the garage.  The home is an elevated ranch.  The garage door opener is very difficult to get to and I have to use an extension ladder leaning on the garage door apparatus to change bulbs.  The garage door itself though is standard height.  There the GD torsion springs have held up for some 15 years.  Wouldn't a high-lift door be more difficult to service?
 
In the Midwest the garage door is what is used primarily to get in and out of the house such that it's used all of the time.

 

[NeverDie]

  Wouldn't a high-lift door be more difficult to service?
.

 
 
The only difference is that you (or whoever does the servicing) would need a taller ladder.     My doors are 8 feet tall, so that already puts an ordinary torsion spring assembly at 9'6" from the floor.  i.e. I already need a ladder to work on it.  Converting to high lift would put it at 14'6", or just 5' higher.  Mechanically, the main difference is the winding drums are "geared" differently so as to maintain constant force to raise the door while pulling upward until the door starts to go horizontal (as with a conventional overhead track), and at that exact point then the winding ratio's transition so as to reduce the upward pull to the extent the door sections start to go horizontal and their weight no longer needs to be counterbalanced.  Regardless of the different shape of the winding drums, though, the installation and maintenance is the same -- just higher off the ground.

 

[pete_c]

Thank-you ND.

 

[LabPaddy]

When garage door closed, torsion spring is loaded with a lot of twist force. When garage door open, the spring is released.  Never opening the garage door would not really make spring last longer in reality. 

Not true. Fatigue cycles cause the failure, not duration of loading.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

Here is a different take... How many springs do you have currently?  Can you put in two and possibly 'get by' when one breaks (maybe just re-tension the unbroken one in the event of a break temporarily)?
 
At my rental house, we had an old 'one piece' wooden door (heavy) and the single spring broke leaving the vehicle trapped inside.  I had to use a cum-along with one end connected on the rafters and the other on the top of the garage door to get it open.

 

[NeverDie]

Here is a different take... How many springs do you have currently?  Can you put in two and possibly 'get by' when one breaks (maybe just re-tension the unbroken one in the event of a break temporarily)?

The door in the OP had just one spring.  I plan to upgrade it to two springs when I do the high lift conversion.  It was only 8 feet wide, and I later figured out that even with no spring at all, the 3/4HP OHD motor could lift the door up, provided I gave it an extra boost with my own muscle.  So, ultimately, we were able to extract the trapped car that way while waiting for Amazon to deliver the spring.  It's a risky maneuver though.  If the gearing on the motor were to slip, the door would slam into the ground like a heavy hammer-onto-anvil before you even knew what happened.
 
For 16' wide doors, you could install 4 springs.  Then the question is: would you even notice if one of them broke?  A Jackshaft has a cable tension sensor, so maybe it would notice, but I really don't know for sure.
 
I have doubt that adding extra tension (enough to make a difference) to one spring to compensate for the other breaking would be safe to do.  I think more than likely you'd break the spring while winding in the extra tension, which is a very dangerous scenario.  I definitely would not do it.

 

[NeverDie]

Fatigue cycles cause the failure, not duration of loading.

FWIW, this is what I've read also.  In fact, I'm reasonably sure this was proven for more than a hundred years ago.
 
That said, I've also read it's more likely to break when its under its maximum load, which, thankfully, is when the door is in the down position.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

 I later figured out that even with no spring at all, the 3/4HP OHD motor could lift the door up, provided I gave it an extra boost with my own muscle.  So, ultimately, we were able to extract the trapped car that way while waiting for Amazon to deliver the spring.  It's a risky maneuver though.  If the gearing on the motor were to slip, the door would slam into the ground like a heavy hammer-onto-anvil before you even knew what happened.

That's why I used the cumalong when this happened to me.

 

[NeverDie]

That's why I used the cumalong when this happened to me.

 
How did you configure the come-along?  Did you just loop it over-and-under the OHD motor?  If my OHD motor hadn't had enough oomph (as it may not on my 16' door), your solution sounds like a good one.
 
In my case, I just used vice-grips on the door track when the door was fully up to ensure it didn't come down while moving the car.  

 

[macromark]

I've been in my house for 16 years. We have an 18' wide door that's tall enough to accommodate an airport shuttle bus. Our torsion spring has broken twice since the original installation and, having watched the repairman replace it, I could probably do it myself.  I choose not to.  As pvrfan says, there's a lot of energy stored in that spring and the risk is not something I want to take on.
 
That said, our software does have a "counter" function in it. You can create an event to increment the counter every time the door is opened or closed (or both). Then, you can create other events to alert you when the counter reaches whatever number you designate.