Woodlea

Don't all electric garage doors have manual opening? Every house I have lived in has, just pull on the handle to disengage the driver and operate the door manually.

RobClubley

Yep mine does. But I assume people don't know that, or don't look.
Maybe they'd rather complain about the inconvenience

Stormer999

Only from the inside Woodlea and a lot of garages here don't have a side door (mine!) Bunnings sell an emergency door opener for power failures that comprises a key in the garage door (drill) and simply a length of cable that attaches to the door inside manual opener. All found out after the last power outage.

Stormer999

I wonder how many people have thought that they will be OK with a power cut because of the manual pull handle without realising they have no access into the garage!
The lad at Bunnings was reloading the shelf when I bought mine!

scrubbedexpat094

We have a manual door opener on the inside of our garage, however never managed to fully open the door as the garage door is too heavy to lift. OH & I tried it earlier this year during a storm. He pulled on the cord & I helped by pushing the door up, got most of the way up but then I couldn't push any further due to my height (short arse!). OH managed to pull it a bit further up which then caused me to get cold rainwater dumped on me from the aluminium tray. I was in my PJ's and was not amused. The OH couldn't pull the garage door any further up & it went crashing back down.

Five minutes later the power came back on

Stormer999

I would get that checked out, either the lifting mechanism isn't disengaging properly or your springs either side are not in correct tension. If it is the later then your lifting motor will be struggling with the weight!

BEVS

Garage door here and no electric = no problem. We still just pull on the handle or the bit of rope.

nzneville

Don't you have an override on your garage door, so that you can open it manually, or are you too decrepit or aged to do that? Same with gate.

BEVS

Who ? Me?

Bo-Jangles

Yes I to learned about this after the fact however still not something I could tackle on my own to lift a double garage door up and over on my own and simultaneously the car out drive out.

I guess to some people I may think of me as decrepit and aged but I've never been the strongest of gals and not about to even test the possibilities, unless absolutely desperate emergency.

Stormer999

God help us There are bloody great big lifting springs either side of the door that provide the counter balance to lift the weight when tensioned correctly the door is very light to open....and when opened stays up by it'self....leaving both hands free to operate the car controls....The manual lift handle is INSIDE the garage which is the point of the emergency opening key!

BEVS

Perhaps this all depends how old one's garage door is.




edit....
I do have a little difficulty with our manual door. There again I am a short r'arse , so getting enough lift going to get the thing moving without my jumping in the air all depends on the day. HeHe.

Stormer999

Talking of short r'arse's when I was young my 29" inside leg was classified as R for regular I was totally miffed when I was downgraded and 29" became S and suddenly I was short with a lot less choice ...

Tranmere Rover

One of our neighbours down the road seems to have had problems opening his garage door during the outage. He's famously not handy - in fact, I wonder how he gets ready for work without hurting himself. He appears to have dealt with this however - their high-gloss, electric door is gone, replaced by a patchwork of bits of old firewood. I like to think his solution to the door issue was to blow it apart with dynamite. Either way, it'll cost him all of $3k to sort this shit out.

If he'd only asked me, I'd have happily shown him the manual handle......

RobClubley

Classic!