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Jeff Wisnia Jeff Wisnia is offline
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Default Sluggish garage-door opener

peter wrote:

I have a Sears chain-driven garage-door opener that's about ten years old.
It's in excellent mechanical condition but lately it's very slow to begin
the opening
or closing cycle. I find myself having to push the remote button for 8-10
seconds at times
before anything happens.

The batteries are newly replaced, I've tried repositioning the pickup
antenna, but
so far nothing seems to help.



If you push the hard-wired button on the wall, does it open immediately?

If so, then the problem is related to the receiver/transmitter. Perhaps your
transmitter button is worn out. Try cleaning the switch or use a spare
transmitter.



I'll second that approach. We have Craftsman units which are about 20
years old now and still going strong, and the transmitters (and the
receiver too I suppose) use slug tuned coils which set the RF operating
frequency.

I recall having to tweak the slug in one of the transmitters to get it
to operate as far from the garage as our other units.

I drilled a 1/8" hole in the case so I could reach the slug with a
tuning tool left over from the old vacuum toob TV set days and adjusted
the slug by trial and error tweaking as I moved away from the garage.

Worked for me...

Jeff

--
Jeffry Wisnia
(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)
"What do you expect from a pig but a grunt?"