Your door, a motor sized for it
A manual garage door does not need replacing to be automated. Most doors in Cape Town that are still lifted by hand — the timber tip-ups in the Southern Suburbs, the older steel sectionals, the roll-ups on the West Coast — are perfectly good doors that were never fitted with a motor, and fitting one is a few hours' work on the door you already own. The door stays. A motor, a rail, a pair of safety beams and two remotes are added, and the door that took two hands and a shove now opens from the car.
What decides whether that motor lasts ten years or three is whether it was sized for the door. Motors are rated by the weight they can lift and the number of cycles a day they can sustain, and a motor chosen from the cheap end of the range for a double sectional that a family opens twelve times a day is being asked to do more than it was built for from its first week. It will work. It will also fail at year three, and the person who fitted it will be long gone. Sizing is the conversation most installers skip because it makes the quote higher; here it is the first conversation, because it is the whole job.
Before a motor goes on, the door gets balanced
A motor is not a substitute for a working spring. Every door that is being automated is checked for balance first — lifted by hand to a few heights to confirm it stays where it is left — because a motor fitted to a heavy, unbalanced door is doing the spring's job as well as its own and will burn out doing it. Where the door is heavy, the spring gets replaced or rewound before the motor is fitted, and that is quoted as part of the automation rather than discovered afterwards.
The rest of the door gets the same look. Rollers that are seized, a track that is out of true, hinges that have worked loose — all of them add load to a motor, and all of them are cheaper to fix before the motor is on than after it has failed because of them. A tip-up door in particular needs its pivot arms and springs checked, because the geometry of a swinging door puts more strain on a motor at the start of the lift than a sectional ever does.
Chain, belt or screw
Motors drive the door along a rail by one of three mechanisms, and the choice matters more than the brand. A chain drive is the workhorse: strong, cheap to repair, and loud — fine on a detached garage, less fine under a bedroom. A belt drive is quieter by a wide margin and is the right answer for a garage with living space above or beside it, at a modest premium. A screw drive has fewer moving parts and suits a heavy door, but it is fussier in a dusty environment, which rules it out on much of the West Coast.
Each is matched to the door type. Sectional doors take any of the three. Roll-up doors use a tubular motor inside the barrel rather than a rail, and the sizing is by the barrel diameter and door weight. Tip-up doors need a motor whose arm geometry suits a swinging panel, and fitting a sectional motor to a tip-up — which happens — is a short route to a bent arm. If you are choosing between door types as well as motors, garage door installation is the page for that; this one assumes the door stays.
The safety systems, set properly
Every motor fitted here is installed with beam sensors across the opening — the two small eyes near the floor that stop the door closing on a child, a pet or a car bumper. They are not optional, and a motor installed without them, which is still common on cheap fits, is a door that will one day close on something. The force limits are set so the door reverses against the resistance of a hand, and the auto-close, where fitted, is set to a delay that suits how the garage is used.
Remotes are programmed on the day — two as standard — and the receiver is left with a note of how to add or remove one, so a lost remote later can be wiped without a callout. Where a household needs more than two, or wants a wall keypad, a phone app, or the door tied into an existing gate remote, that is set up at the same time; adding it afterwards is a remote and receiver visit.
Replacing a motor on an already-automated door
Half of automation work is not a manual door at all: it is a door with a motor that has died, on a brand whose board can no longer be sourced, or a motor that was never rated for the door and has failed as predicted. The process is the same — balance first, size the replacement to the real door, fit, set the safety, program the remotes — and the old rail often stays where the new motor is compatible with it, which keeps the cost down.
The one thing that changes is the conversation about why the old motor failed. If it was a board on a discontinued brand, that is bad luck. If it was a motor straining against a door it was never rated for, the replacement is sized properly and the problem does not come back. If it was a motor lifting a door with a tired spring, the spring is dealt with first — otherwise the new motor goes the same way as the old one, and a motor repair becomes a motor replacement for the second time in three years.