Jackshaft

Something I didn’t mention in the garage door post was that the garage door opener they installed in the shop bay was useless as soon as I put up the lift. It would have hit the roof of a car up on the lift. I knew this was the case, but as I said in the other post I didn’t even know the bid included garage door openers.

Unlike a conventional 16′ wide garage door there is no support in the center of the door so the opener was mounted off center. I wondered if I could hang the conventional opener all the way on the side where it would be out of the way of the car on the lift.

After some asking around I found that mounting it all the way on the side like that would likely cause binding issues and would look…funky. I found out that LiftMaster made a residential jackshaft garage door opener that was significantly cheaper than I thought. It was ~$400 and I was able to sell the conventional opener for $200 since it had a nice solid 10′ track/carriage.

In fact, I liked the new opener so much I put one on the inception shed garage door too!

We even decided to replace the house garage door opener because it was so loud an obnoxious and we love how quiet the jackshaft openers are

Another perk of this style opener is the pull string locks and unlocks the door from opening. So unlike a normal opener when there is a power outage you can unlock the door roll it up manually then lock it with it open and not worrying about it snapping shut.