Just got a new garage door opener, the Genie Excelerator. The old-style, very noisy chain-drive is on its way out. I had been familiar with the ultra-quiet belt drive for five years, and thought that if I ever had occasion to buy an opener, it would be chain-drive.
But in consulting Consumer Reports, I saw that there was also a screw-drive option, which is nearly as quiet as chain drive. The reason I went for that is the Excelerator opens the door nearly twice as fast. For safey considerations, it closes at the normal speed (a feature also found on elevator doors). We use the keypad a lot, so if you think about it, opening fast is what is important, it doesn't matter how long it takes to close.
I would never have replaced a functional chain-driven opener for those two reasons, but if I had to replace it anyway, those were good things to have. And the old one, to my great disappointment, since the previous owners had installed it only 3 years before, was acting up. The chain had jumped the drive for a second time, plus there was some other flakiness that I suspect was related to a board going bad. So I decided to cut my losses. Oh, the really great feature of this model--it comes with a lifetime warranty on parts and labor!
I encountered two major glitches in the instructions for the wireless keypad. So bad that I had to resort to calling the help line. The first glitch was that the opener manual said press "1-2-3-PROG" to initiate prgoramming the PIN, whereas the keypad instruction leaflet said press "3-5-7-PROG".
Anyway, after much dithering, and running back and forth pressing the LEARN button on the opener itself, I determined that the PIN wasn't getting stored in the keypad. I decided I should try erasing and re-programming ("Press and hold in order PROG-6-ENTER").
But that didn't work either, so I called for help. The first thing they had me do was to erase. But they carefully explained that I had to take 3 fingers of one hand, and press and hold the buttons simultaneously. Oh, I said, like CTRL-ALT-DELETE. The CSR--who was very polite and helpful--said "Yes, exactly. We find that hard to explain in instructions, so that's what we are here for".
My first thought was that I must have glossed over that in reading the instructions. But no, they clearly said "in order" (and of course had no helpful analogy about the familiar CTRL-ALT-DELETE trick). I can hardly imagine how many calls they must receive about this. Probably the only saving grace is that the installers usually set it all for you.
11:16:00 AM 
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