Garage door openers are incredibly convenient, that’s no secret. All you have to do is press a button and your garage door will open for you. Garage Door Openers weren’t used regularly in residential areas until the seventies. Before the use of garage door openers, homeowners had to get out of their cars and manually open their garage doors.

In the case of a power outage or if you want to open your garage door just slightly, you may want to switch back to the manual opening of your garage door rather than using the garage door opener.

We are going to give you a step-by-step guide to allow you to safely reset your garage door. Be sure that your garage door is in the down position before starting this process, to protect you and those around you from a free-falling garage door. If your garage door is already open whenever a power outage occurs, be sure to call your local Garage Door Guys to come out and manually reset your garage door.

Here are a few swimple instructions on how to reset your garage door so that it can open manually.

1. Safety First – Place Door in Down Position

As we stated above, you need to be 100% certain that your garage door is in the down position. If your garage door is open, it can be incredibly dangerous because a broken garage door is unprdictable. The entir garage door could fall on top of you and damage anything in its path. This could result in serious injury and in some cases even death.

2. Pull The Emergency Release Cord

This sounds like something out of a movie, but this in fact a real thing that every garage door has. You’ve probably noticed it before, it is a red rope or string that hangs down from the garage door trolley. The trolley and opener carriage are connected and the opener carriage is a mechainish that automatically moves along the door tracks as the garage door opens and closes. Whenever you pull the emergency release cord, the trolley will detach from the opener carriage. This is what allows the garage door to be moved manually. 

3. Move The Garage Door Manually

After going through the steps above where you pull the emergency release cord, you can now move the garage door open or closed. Now that you have moved the garage door and want to reset the automatic garage door opener, you need to reinsure that the door is in the closed position again.

4. Pull Emergency Release Cord in the Direction of The Door

Just as you pulled the emergenc release cord to disengage the trolley, you will need to pull it again to engage the trolley. You will need to pull you emergency release cord down. This will be in the direction of the door, and further away from the motor.

5. Reconnect the Trolley to the Opener Carriage

There are a couple of ways you can make sure that your opener carriage and trolley are connected. After the spring lever has been put back in the righ tposition from pulling the red emergency release cord, you wull slide your garage door to where it re-engages. You can also hit the garage door opener on the remote and it will reconnect once it hits the correct spot,a automatically. You will know when it is reconnected because there will be a loud clicking noise.

If this seems too difficult or too time consuming for you to do on your own, you can always call one of our technicians to come out and do it for you!