Garage Door Opener Not Working



Question:
Sorry for the length of this but I wanted to give the whole history. I have a garage door opener that is not working. It has always opened with no problem but about 2 months ago it started to have problems closing. It appeared to hang on something and stop closing. It would take 2 or 3 attempts at pushing the remote button to get it to close. I could not see what was causing the door to stop closing. After a while this got gradually worse (it seemed worse in cold weather) where I would have to hit the button 5 or 6 times. At this point I figured I'd hold onto the handle when I hit the button and see if I could feel the door hitting something. The door closed very snmoothly. So after a few months of silently mouthing the words "damn door" every time I had to close it, it finally occured to me that I should adjust the sensitivity setting. I can be pretty sharp sometimes. When I adjusted the closing sensitivity the door began to close with no problems. I then started playing with the setting so that it would close ok but still provide crush protection. I was opening and closing the door repeatedly when the unit started to smoke and stopped working completely. The solenoid would click but the motor would not start. The wierd thing about the smoke is that I never smelled anything. I would have thought that if something was burning or there was a short I would have smelled buring insulation or an electrical type smell. There was nothing and I got real close to check. I took the cover off the unit and the motor was pretty hot but I saw no burning, charing etc. The door worked a time or two after I let things sit for a while but now does not work at all. So today, the solenoid clicks but the motor does not engage. Also, the light on the opener seems to be staying on all the time. Any ideas on what I should look at to try to figure out what the problem is and fix it. I hate to but a new opener if I do not have to. Oh, not sure of the model name but this is a Fimble opener

Answer:
Look on the unit to see if there's a white or red button sticking out of a black plastic housing somewhere on the outside (probably back) of the box. This may be a circuit breaker. If that's not it then I'm afraid the thing's fried. The units usually include a self-resetting overheat cutout, but I suspect that in your case a starter winding burned out and the motor's fried.





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