08/20/2025
Good morning everyone.
I am Terry Beech.
I am the owner and operator of Beech’s Overhead Door.
We have been a family owned business in Southlake since 1983.
Today’s lesson is what things are called .
First of all an Overhead Door is a garage door that goes up Overhead.
When we started the company, we were trying to decide whether we wanted to call it Overhead Door or Garage Doors Being an old school we called it Overhead Door, sometimes I wish we had gone with Garage Doors because there is an Overhead Door brand and people always confuse us with those dealerships.
This is totally understandable . It is just like everybody calling trimmers w**d eaters. Weedeater is a brand, and granted they were probably the first ones to come out with it so the name caught on. I say the same thing.
We do not sell Overhead Door brand doors or openers
(Which are actually made by Genie now)
We sell Amarr Garage Doors and LiftMaster garage door openers . by the way, LiftMaster is sold in hardware stores as a chamberlain or a craftsman and they are sold by several other names. Also, they are by far the number one selling garage door opener beating all the other brands combined.

Today’s lesson is calling things by their real name.
When I take a service call, I ask a lot of questions trying to determine what the problem really is and what parts my service man needs to carry to make sure he takes care of the problem while he’s there.
Sometimes this is very demanding because people call things by several different names and some are absolutely creative.
Let’s start with the number one thing that is call by the wrong name.
The thing in your car ,usually clipped to the visor is called a remote. It is not called the garage door opener or clicker or thing that you point at the door because you do not pointed at the door anyway.
Just like the remote control for your TV is not called a TV .
And yes, it does have a battery in it. It has to have some sort of power source so unless you have an extension cord plugged into it, it is battery operated.
You would be surprised how many people don’t know that there is a battery inside. Same for your outside keypad.
Years ago they used to be hardwired, but now they are all remote controls mounted to the jamb basically.
When someone calls in and tells me they need to replace their garage door opener and I give them a price of $700 or higher they cannot believe that that little box cost that much, again they are talking about the remote control.
The garage door opener hangs from the ceiling in your garage And it opens your garage door by remote control or wall button.
Springs Lift the garage door by pulling on a cable not a wire. Wires are used to conduct electricity. Cables do not push the door down. They only pull the door up. Gravity closes the door. If you don’t believe me, take a cable or a chain and try to push it up a hill.
90% of all Garage Doors or steel not aluminum. There are wood doors and aluminum doors, but usually the ones that have all glass in them top to bottom, and aluminum is very expensive and has to be so thick to support its own weight where a steel door does not need to be that thick.
People will argue with me all day long so I tell them get a magnet and see if it sticks to the door, if it does, it is steel. Then they say where the hell am I supposed to get a magnet and I reply look on your refrigerator.
The joint bracket that holds your sections together is called a hinge, just like on a closet door front door, car door, or refrigerator door they all have hinges.
Most garage door openers nowadays are belt driven.
There are chain and screw drives, but belt drives are taken over.
These are the same belts that motorcycles use now instead of chain s and the belts found in your car engine. They are usually made of Kevlar with cables running through them.
They are not plastic ribbons that go around and around. 
Springs lift all the weight of your garage door, not the garage door opener. If your door is balanced correctly, your garage door opener should only have to lift about 5 to 15 pounds. They are not weightlifters. They just move the door for you. They do not have to lift it.
All springs break They are just like the tires on your car.
The more you use the door the faster your spring will break.
My front door is almost right next to my garage door.
So going out to the mailbox or get something out of the car on the driveway I used to tell my kids and my wife use the front door. There is no reason to walk through the utility room and open and close two doors and then the garage door to go out to the car or mailbox. GO OUT THE FRONT DOOR.
When the spring breaks you will know this because there will be roughly a 3 inch gap in the spring and the door will be heavy as hell.  if you are at home when it breaks, you are most likely hear a loud bang like a gun goes off in the garage. 
You can oil them all you want to keep them quiet, but there’s no getting around them breaking unless you just don’t use the door. Think about that every time you go in and out of the garage, you are using up a cycle of springs.
The wall button is what is mounted on the wall usually by your entry door to the house and it is almost always hardwired. The thing outside that you push a code into is not mounted on a wall. It is mounted on the door jam. It is now always battery operating because it is basically a remote control that you have to put a code into to send a certain signal.
When people call him with a broken spring and ask how much it cost to replace it springs are sold by the pound so the heavier your door is the more it’s gonna cost some doors have one spring some have up to four. When I ask what size your door is , “Standard “ is not the right answer because there are several standard sizes.
Just like when you buy tires, you don’t call Discount Tire and say how much are four tires and they ask you what size, you can’t just say standard .
The two little boxes mounted about 6 inches from the floor on each side of your garage door are called safety sensors.
They are sometimes called cameras, photo cells or a few other things.
I had a guy call the other day and tried to be so scientific with me. This happens from time to time and he called them Infra Red laser beam projectiles and that were mis-configurated . And he did not have the appropriate equipment to make them coincide with each other.
All he had to say was my safety sensors are misaligned 
The equipment we used to align them is called our eyes.
He said how the hell are you supposed to tell if they are aligned and sequenced, and I told him because the door will close if they’re misaligned, the door will not close unless you hold the wall button continuously .
Up until a few years ago, LiftMaster would flash the lights 10 times if the safety sensors were causing the problem which meant something was in front of them or they were misaligned. I knew then that it was the safety sensors and told them they probably just need to be adjusted a little bit to make them work. Because of a lawsuit they had to stop doing that but we still ask people if you hold the wall button, will it close and that tells us the same thing on every brand
When I would ask people if the lights were blinking 10 times on the garage door opener when they tried to close it Sometimes they would say no.
So we go out to fix it and all it was a safety sensor misaligned a little bit and find out that the lightbulbs are burnt out or missing.  They get mad at you for not telling them that was all they had to do was realign the safety sensor over the phone, which I try to do and that’s why I asked that question not knowing that their bulbs were burnt out.
I really don’t like charging people for short service calls but what they don’t understand is we have to drive out to their house and while we’re doing that we’re not getting other jobs done so that’s why they get charged. We also will go over the door. adjust anything we can find wrong and lubricate the door. 
I do try to be patient with customers because I do know that this is not what they do for a living and I try very hard to talk them through everything.
I can only imagine what car mechanics go through or in my case my computer man.
I hope this helps everyone and I hope y’all have a wonderful day.
This was not meant to be a smart ass post.
It was actually my way of helping people understand how Garage Doors work.
I really hope it helps somebody.
If you do need us, please call us at 817-488-8151 
We are located in Southlake and we service a 50 mile radius.
Please call for free advice and I will try my best to talk to you through a repair if it’s a minor one
Terry Beech. 
