Garage Door Repair - How to Use the Trolley Opener Release

So, you’re getting ready to go to work in the morning. You’ve got your coffee and you are headed for another adventurous day in a cubicle, or on a worksite, a store, an office, or any one of the other millions of places where you may be gainfully employed. Maybe you’re looking for work. Job or not, maybe you’re running a little behind. So you get in your car, but before you start it, you press the button to get your garage door to open. And…Nothing…Happens.

This is a sad state of affairs. You try the button again and it still doesn’t work. So, muttering, you get out of your vehicle and press the button on the wall to manually start the door.

And…Nothing…Happens. And it’s at this point that you realize that if the garage door doesn’t open, there is no way you are taking your car anywhere. So we go back to the days of our prehistoric ancestors and open the garage door by hand.

The Emergency Trolley Opener Release
Every automatic garage door system is equipped with an emergency manual release. There are many good reasons for this. Any electrical system has a problem if the power goes out. In the case of an emergency in inclement weather, people will still need to take their cars and go places.

An automatic garage door system uses two functional parts to raise a door. Most of the heavy lifting is done through the use of torsion springs. These work as a tension counterweight to the door and are entirely mechanical. There is no electricity involved to make these guys work. They just exert an amount of force against the weight of the door.

The second piece of the automatic garage door opener is the electrical motor. It uses a bicycle chain to either pull the door up, or push it down, but it really exerts very little energy. It basically guides the door either up or down and lets the springs do the heavy lifting. It attaches to the top of the garage door using a metal bracket, which the chain is attached to. And at the top of this metal bracket is a handle with an emergency release. This allows you to manually move the garage door by hand along the trolley bar.

How to Use the Emergency Release
It may have different releases depending on the system being used, but they all do essentially the same thing: they allow you to disconnect from the chain and move the door freely along the trolley bar. The release uses a handle or short rope to release the connection between the bracket and the chain system. The bracket remains in the track and you can use the handle to move the door up and down. It generally only needs 10 pounds of pressure or less. And when the door is closed, the bracket will snap back onto the automatic door system until it is manually released again.