Check these three things before you book
A fair proportion of "broken opener" calls turn out not to be the opener. Two minutes of checking can save you a call-out.
Is it actually the door, not the opener?
Pull the red release cord and lift the door by hand. If it feels like its full weight and will not stay up, you have a broken spring — and the opener is refusing to move it because its force sensing is working exactly as designed. That is a spring repair, not an opener repair. This single mix-up is the most common misdiagnosis we see.
Do the photo-eyes have a steady light?
Both sensors near the floor should show a steady LED. A blinking or dark one means the beam is broken or the pair is out of alignment, and the opener will refuse to close — usually flashing its overhead light a set number of times to tell you so. Wipe both lenses; the valley's fine agricultural dust reads as an obstruction. Then check nothing has nudged a bracket.
Wall button works but the remote does not?
That isolates the fault to the remote, the receiver, or the antenna — not the drive. Try a fresh battery and re-pair the remote before assuming anything expensive. If a second remote also fails, the receiver is the likely culprit.
Repair or replace?
The honest line sits at about fifteen years. Beyond that, parts availability drops off sharply and the rest of the drive train is the same age as the part that just failed — so a repair often buys months rather than years.
There is a security argument too. Openers built before the mid-1990s use fixed-code remotes, where the same code is transmitted every time and can be captured and replayed. Every modern opener uses rolling codes that change on each use. If your opener predates that change, replacement is a security upgrade as much as a reliability one.
Where repair clearly wins: a failed logic board or capacitor on a unit under ten years old, a stripped drive gear on an otherwise sound chain drive, sensors, remotes, and keypads. Repair runs $130–$250 against $480–$870 installed for a new unit — the full breakdown is in our Yakima cost guide.
Drive types, and which suits which garage
Chain drive is the cheapest and the loudest. Fine for a detached garage, poor under a bedroom.
Belt drive runs on a reinforced rubber belt and is markedly quieter. This is the default recommendation for an attached garage, and the noise difference is the single upgrade customers notice most.
Direct drive moves the motor along a fixed chain inside a rail, so there is one moving part. Quietest of the three and the longest-lived, at the highest price.
Jackshaft mounts on the wall beside the torsion shaft rather than on the ceiling. The answer for low headroom, cathedral ceilings, or a garage where you want the ceiling clear for storage.
Whichever you choose, the door has to be correctly balanced first. An opener is sized to move a counterbalanced door, not to lift its dead weight — fitting a new opener to a badly sprung door just moves the failure to the new motor.