Ups and Downs; at least, that's the goal.

We're having trouble with our garage door opener.  Its a Genie Pro 500.  Anyway, we drove home from mom's the other day and the garage door opener wouldn't work.  I got out and tried the key pad.  It didn't work.  We had our house keys, of course, but the front door was also chained, like this:

So we went to the neighbor's and borrowed some bolt cutters (man those are cool, I think we're gonna get some to leave in the car).  We managed to get in, tried to open the door from inside the garage, and it still didn't work.  It just made a humming noise.

My neighbor offered to help me fix it.  He came over the next day.  We messed with a few settings, but nothing changed.  We thought about going inside the box, but 1) we couldn't open it, and 2) I was afraid of voiding the warranty.

Today I called Genie customer service.  I explained it was still under warranty.  I figured they would get my address and schedule an appointment for a service technician to come over.  Instead, they asked me a bunch of questions, transferred me to a level 2 tech, then he asked me to dismantle the thing!  It kinda reminded me of the commercial where the guy is sitting at his kitchen table with a steak knife getting instructions over the phone on how to remove his own appendix or something.  Anyway, I explained that I had a hard time trying to get into it before, and the tech just said "yup, this is probably the hardest model to get in to."  He said I would only have to remove the left panel.  So I told him I'd give it another try and call him back.

I got that panel off, called back, and got another level 2 tech.  He said it sounded like the problem was with the capacitor.  He asked me to locate it.  I told him I didn't see it.  He got frustrated with me.  He described it and told me to find it and see if I found any fluid around it, or smelled anything burnt or saw anything that looked burnt or loose.  I told him I had only taken off the left panel, and he told me I would have to take them all off.  I told him that I was concerned about that because I would have to remove four wires that were attached from the outside to the opener.  He seemed irritated at that and told me they were easy to put back on.  So I told him I'd try again and call him back.  I finally got all the panels off, located the capacitor, and everything seemed OK.

I called back, thinking "what are they gonna do if its the capacitor anyway, walk me through the process of removing it with a soldering iron, tell me to go to Radio Shack, then walk me through the soldering process again to replace it?"  Anyway, I didn't get that far, because I could only get through to a level 1 tech.  She told me they were going to close in 30 minutes and all the level 2 techs were busy.  She asked if he could call me back if he had time, or call me in the morning if he didn't.  At this point, I was a little frustrated and explained that I'd never had to do this much to trouble shoot a warrantied part.  I told her it would be fine for him to call me back and that I'd work on my engineering degree while I was waiting.

Brian (the level 2 tech) called back.  I told him I didn't see any of the issues with the capacitor that he wanted me to look for.  He had me locate a gear and told me to spin it 10 times.  "Uh, is this all pretty low voltage stuff?  Should I turn off the power or something?" I asked.

"Well, I would at least unplug it," he said.

"Thanks for volunteering the information before asking me to stick my hand in there!" I thought.  Later, I wondered if there was anything else that was dangerous that I did that he didn't warn me about.

Anyway, once I found the part and spun in around, he asked me to see if it worked.  It didn't.  He told me I would have to contact the people who installed it and have them come and take a look at it.

At least the call center seemed to be located somewhere here in the States.  I'll try to call the builder tomorrow and ask who they had install garage door opener.