Our garage still has its original garage door. It's old school: a flat hunk of wood that levers upward on a hinge to open.
Marian has long wanted to replace it with a modern roll-up paneled door, but I've resisted because the old one is fine. Why bother? But luckily for her, some house painters recently power washed the door and tore off huge hunks of wood at the bottom. They appear to think that painting over this damage makes everything fine, so now Marian has the better of our argument. The old door isn't fine, so maybe we finally need a new, termite-free metal roll-up door.
Which is fine. I knew I couldn't hold out forever. But I still have one complaint left: our old-style door opens fully in five seconds. Yes, I've timed it. Roll-up doors take ten seconds. But why? I can't come up with any good reason that they have to open at such a snail's pace. A Google search comes up with loads of hits for (allegedly) high-speed roll-up doors, but they're all for commercial doors, not residential garages.
Does anyone what the deal is here? If you open a roll-up door by hand you can do it very quickly. So it's got nothing to do with the mechanics of the door. It's just that garage door openers are slow. Why?
Lower powered newer motors that save electricity, or the metal weighs more?
Really, I can't see anything missing in that picture.
The newer doors take 5 times longer to open because they have 5 individual sections whereas the older door is only one piece. Simple physics.
BAHF entry!
Berlin Airlift Historical Foundation
Big Apple Hockey Festival
Bishop's Academy at Holy Family
These are the meanings I found for BAHF. But none fit.
If you're from Boston it's Slang for Vomit or Throw up. I don't know why. I'm not from Boston.
Not sure that’s right either…
I grew up in Boston and always assumed “barf” (bahf) was universal.
😄😄😄😄 Touché
It's universal after you get wicked faced.
Disagree about the physics: each piece of a 5-piece roll-up door weighs 1/5 as much as a single-piece door. And each piece moves a little bit less than its corresponding element on the 1-piece (sketch the paths).
I think there differences are due to:
- faster motors cost more
- (legal) caution about getting your fingers squose between the pieces. Especially children's fingers. It's very possible.
So, the motorized roll-ups are slow. My hand-powered one can be quite fast.
Faster motors also use more power (amps). Either the wiring or the breaker might limit the speed.
I really liked having a hand-powered garage door with a counterweight, but I didn't like having to lock it. My wife said she would never in a million years support getting one of those, so automatic door it was!
If the old motor is in good condition and works with a new door, keep it a d forgo the new one.
This. Also, garage door springs for the roll-up doors are no joke.
The coil springs on a roll up door work in torsion and are under a lot of stress. One of the springs on the door installed when our house was built failed within a year. The technician informed me the original springs are poor quality, but was happy to install an upgraded set that have been good for 20 years so far. Also, if you accidentally release the preload on the springs, you can get a technician out the same day even on a weekend to fix it (don’t ask me how I know).
There are some pretty significant springs on the old tilt up style garage doors as well which are no joke to install or work on.
Just plan to leave five seconds earlier. Problem solved.
Your software is becoming self-aware. It's not letting me post, and what could be more intelligent than that?
Bob Villa has a review of openers and say the Genie Signature Series screw drive (from Home Depot) is twice as fast as the others. But no speeds or speed settings listed.
Let's see if posting without links goes through. Or I'll stop trying and Kevin will have a slow opener.
chatgpt says:
Garage door openers are generally designed with a balance between speed and safety, and there are several reasons why they tend to operate at a relatively slow pace:
1. **Safety Concerns**: The primary reason for the slower speed of garage door openers is safety. A faster-moving garage door can be dangerous, potentially causing injury to people or pets who might be in its path. The slower speed gives more time for safety sensors to detect an obstruction and stop the door from closing.
2. **Mechanical Stress**: Garage doors are large, heavy objects. Moving them at high speeds would put a significant strain on the mechanical parts of the opener, including the motor, gears, and springs. This could lead to more frequent maintenance issues or a shorter lifespan for the opener.
3. **Noise Reduction**: Faster movement would likely result in more noise, which could be disruptive, especially in residential areas or when the garage is attached to the house.
4. **Regulatory Standards**: There may be industry standards or regulations that dictate the maximum speed for garage door openers to ensure a uniform level of safety and reliability.
5. **Cost and Practicality**: Designing a garage door opener to move faster could increase manufacturing costs due to the need for more robust and durable components. Additionally, the slight time saved with a faster door may not be significant enough for most users to justify these additional costs.
Overall, while a faster garage door opener might seem convenient, the trade-offs in terms of safety, durability, noise, and cost are significant factors that manufacturers consider in their design and operation standards.
...And engineer that I am, I'd like to call particular attention to that "mechanical stress", right after "safety concerns".
A lot of things in a lot of homes are not installed correctly, not maintained correctly, abused, used to do things ranging from clever/stupid to downright nutty and dangerous, and so on.
Motors capable of quickly throwing substantial weight are also capable of doing a lot of damage. That's OK in a commercial operation where someone else's insurance makes people pay attention to maintenance (in theory).
It becomes a plaintiff's lawyer-magnet when that motor is installed with "a few parts left over" by your kinda-handy cousin on a shaky beam and then ignored for a decade.
my 4wd truck runs slower in 4wd-low, but has more power. this is due to gearing ratio, and is similar (I think) to a geared bicycle. I think newer doors have smaller gears, so smaller motors can be used, saving power. the trade-off is speed. this is 100% speculation.
I think kahner is right. I had the old swing-out garage door and replaced it with the multi-panel door, and I noticed that the multi-panel door is motor-operated through a mechanism which has a trip-out point, which disconnects the motor from the door if the door hits an obstacle (like my head).
Trip-out mechanisms operate by necessity by tripping out at some force level. That force level could be reached either by hitting my head, or by trying to accelerate the heavy door past some given acceleration rate.
My guess is that the weight of the door, and hence the force required to lift the door, determines how fast you can jerk the door open without tripping the safety cut-out.
I think the safety concerns mainly apply when the door is being lowered, whereas Kevin is concerned about how quickly the door is raised. So a door opener that opened the door quicker than it closed it could meet both concerns, but would add to the cost, and the current speed is fast enough for some people. I press the garage door opener when I enter the garage. By the time I have walked to my car, gotten in, fastened my seat belt, and started the car, 10 seconds have passed and the door is open. When I return, I press the button to open the door when I am about 300 feet from my driveway to allow the door time to open.
Slower speed also gives people and pets more time to detect moving garage doors.
Presumably while the weight and distance traveled may be the same, having 5 sections instead of 1 increases the safety concern, durability, and noise concerns.
As with most things, the answer is liability.
Your old door is its own counterweight. Multi-section garage doors use a spring counterweight, and every other aspect of the design is determined by the need to reduce, to as near zero as possible, the chance of those springs ever being catastrophically released, because if they were, pieces of metal and/or wood, of various sizes, would be propelled to surprising distances at surprising velocities, undeterred by any intervening objects, living or inanimate. Openers are underpowered because more powerful ones would eventually cause uncontained failures. Lubrication degrades over time, meaning that friction increases.
I don't think that's true. Single-panel garage doors rely on springs. I've had to open such a door when one of the four springs had broken, and it took a lot of effort.
The houses in my neighborhood were built in the 1960s and had spring mechanism. Oh boy dangerous when they failed and yes a PITA to lift when broken. My parent's old house had a spring fail but luckily nobody in the garage when it happened and no cars in the garage when it happened.
I like this answer. I've been in my garage when one of those springs broke and it sounded like a gunshot. the recoil was massive! I don't recommend the experience.
Why did you use all those words to say they're slow because they're under pressure and can kill someone?
Marian was right the newer doors are better but it sort of depends on whether or not the garage is part of the house or not. My garage is built into the house so we don't park cars in there, it's also too small for that. Getting a new modern door kept the rest of the house a lot warmer in the winter. There might also be safety concerns - would a newer door be harder to break into?
Get a Sommer opener. True, they may not be any faster, but you will not hear it in the house, guaranteed. Home Depot has dumped 'em, but Amazon is there.
Just to say -- I love your page, but if 5 vs. 10 seconds is a problem, I can't help ya.
My guess, based on admittedly distant memories of opening both by hand, is that the solid ones require more torque to get going (and far less once the weight balance shifts--in fact, I remember having to keep them from opening too fast at after the mid-point), whereas the sectional ones take less torque to get moving, although it needs to be fairly continuously applied to keep them moving upwards.
Hence, more powerful motors, and faster starts. But I like the regulatory and wear-and-tear explanations too. Maybe this one's "overdetermined," as they say in garage door opener grad school.
I'd spring for vertical panels; you'll be the toast of the neighborhood!
You have no kids and are retired. You have the time to wait.
My metal door has a spring at the top which is wound tightly. Don't mess with it. A painter wanted to do a good job painting my neighbor's garage and unbolted the spring which instantly uncoiled breaking his forearm with his wrench. He was last seen running down the street leaving a trail of blood. Anyway, this problem will soon solve itself. When you are slightly older you will remember something you forgot after you get in the car. This can happen several times. It will take you much longer than 5 seconds to take care of all the things you have forgotten. When you get home, I suggest you use the 5 seconds to survey the car and try to get everything with you that you don't want to leave in the car such as glasses, groceries, wallet, cats or wife.
Can they make garage doors that operate like stage curtains?
Swinging a solid door out of the way is inherently faster than retracting an articulated door.
Take a long object like a pool cue. Hold it vertically from the top end. Swing it up to horizontal.
Now take a rope of the same length, grab it at the top and go hand over hand till you reach the bottom.
Swinging the pool cue is much faster, right? The bottom end moves much faster when you swing than when you retract.
Openers are doing quite a bit more work on sectional doors, is my answer. This video gave me my very first look at a one-piece door's mechanism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PPoigaenZw
Assuming Kevin's door is similar, then from the video it looks like the door is not only a whole lot lighter than a sectional one, but also it doesn't need to move anywhere nearly as far as the other kind. It doesn't even have a track-- it's mounted on an articulating pivot that seems to have its own integrated spring mechanism, and when the door's been opened, a noticeable chunk of it is sticking out the garage opening. So the one-piece door doesn't have far to move and it's light.
Compare that to the sectional door that has heavy rails top and bottom of each section and a whole interior track structure. Springs counteract the weight; however, when you open a sectional door, you're raising the whole door its entire height, plus you're also moving it backward by its entire height, because with these doors everything ends up well inside the opening. Moving the door that big bit farther is more work for the opener to do, and it's bound to take longer.
Are these one-piece doors a California thing, or were they common at a particular time? Surprisingly interesting question, and a new frontier of homeowner knowledge here in the first world!
Let's talk nomenclature.
Roll-up doors are doors with thin horizontal sections that allow it to roll up around itself, often housed in a metal case. What you're asking about are overhead sectional doors, but specifically, overhead door operators.
Now, it may be that your current operator can work with a new sectional overhead door, but you probably have to do a lot of homework and/or consult with an installer. If your existing door was solid wood, then a vinyl sectional door would likely be lighter (and could work with your current operator, notwithstanding other technical issues).
So, about speed.
"Horsepower" is not necessarily a function of speed. If the electronics controlling the speed in the housing is set to, say 6 inches per second, you're not going to get a faster speed by switching out the motor. Usually in this space, higher HP gives you the power to lift heavier doors. You're going to have to ask for the maximum speed for each model, which often comes down to price points.
There are different kinds of operators. The most common (and obviously the cheapest) is the type that works with either belt or chain drives. I believe they range anywhere between 6 and 10 inches per second. That gives you a range of 14 - 8.4 seconds for a 7' high door. Then there's the screw drive operator which I think might have a maximum speed of 12 inches per second, maybe more. Maybe your existing door is a screw drive operator.
Newer = slower?
There's nothing technically (in ASTM/ANSI/ICC) preventing a residential sectional overhead door operator from working at higher speeds or using a commercial performance operator, though it likely means higher voltage and much higher costs.
High speed commercial overhead doors can operate as fast as 80 inches per second. This, in a roundabout way, leads to my final point: If your door closes faster than it opens, maybe this is an issue with your counter-weight and not a case of newer = slower?
Having the motor run at the same speed for closing and opening is the simplest design and likely 5 seconds to close is considered too fast to be safe.
Here's the simplest way to figure this out. Find the pivot pin at the top of the door where the opener mechanism hooks to the door. Measure how high that pin is from the floor; that's your approximate door height. Open the door. Measure (estimate, pace off, whatever) the distance from where the pivot pin is now to the wall with the door opening in it (ie, how far the pin has moved away from that wall). Or you could just measure to the top of the door itself in both positions. Measuring to the nearest quarter-foot is plenty precise.
Is the pivot pin at least the full height of the door away from the door opening? If you have a one-piece door, probably not-- that distance is probably something between half and three-quarters the height of the door.
If you have a sectional door, the pivot pin will be at least the full height of the door away from the opening, because the whole door is retracted and stowed overhead with this style.
And basically that's why sectional doors take longer to open. The opener has to move them farther.
There are a lot of thoughtful & informative responses here, but my question is, why would a smart guy like Kevin Drum want to disagree with his wife?
Depends how much you care about noise (for yourself and your neighbors).
I used to live in an apartment where the noise of the other garage doors opening drove me nuts. For my new house, I chose a garage door that is slower than usual; but also whisper quiet.
There are probably also safety regulations that limit how fast any garage door can close these days. Welcome to, as they say, life in the Longhouse.
Do you have an automatic opener on the current garage door?
If so, your can ask the garage for the roll-up garage door installers if they can just use your old, faster garage door opener (and save a few hundred bucks as well).
If the installer can't (or WON'T) use the old automatic opener, you can always have it installed without an automatic opener, and see if a handyman can figure out a way to retrofit your old, speedy automatic opener for your new roll up garage door.
My in-laws were able to find a handyman that was able to retrofit an automatic opener onto there side-hinged garage doors.
my paneled garage door is from 1987, not exactly modern..
it disintegrated about five years ago. Numbers of the small screws and bolts holding all those panels together had fallen out and the entire structure was torn apart by springs yanking on it. I rebuilt the whole door section by section and rehung it. This gave me a healthy respect for the springs and forces involved. A single horizontal section of panels was as much as I could lift unaided.
So the door entire has to be several hundred pounds. To move that fast would need either terrifyingly strong springs requiring industrial machinery to install, and/or large engines. Either of those going wrong could easily be lethal.
Actually the springs are terrifying even for the slow-speed doors..
Modern residential garage door openers are intentionally kept to a slow speed to prevent injury or damage. Specifically, the motor controls on residential doors use load sensing to detect collisions, unlike high-speed commercial doors, which use additional motion and collision sensors.
You could simply not use a garage door opener, a properly balanced door will take little to no effort to operate.
I installed a belt drive opener (they're quieter than a chain drive) on a two-car metal door some years back (20!) and I recall that it had an adjustment for opening speed which I set to the max because why not? One evening the door didn't open because the monster spring broke. No biggie except for the fact that the max opening speed applied enough pull to the middle of the non-opening metal door to give it a slight permanent bend in the top metal segment. Sigh. After I got the spring replaced (spray oil on those things to help make them last) I left the door set for max opening speed because I had nothing to lose given that the door was already slighty bent. Not bad enough to replace but I could see it.
I have a sectional door and installed a screw drive, because in my mind the screw was pushing against its anchor on the door frame rather than pulling on the mounted motor. Plenty strong: until the limit switch, a simple hanging plastic toggle, failed, and it kept on driving until the wooden door was broken. The new door has metal insulated panels, but due to indigence I didn't replace the drive, and open it manually. The garage has long passed the era of actually fitting a car in there, so no big deal.