The automatic garage door opener finally is working again

[Fat-Dumb and Happy]

Lots of cool videos on youtube about installing, repairing and adjusting garage doors. The safety sensors seem to be a common problem. One of mine had quit working. 40 bucks at Lowes! You can get them on amazon for around 20 bucks or e-bay, while looking at them at Amazon in one of the comments, " if you are handy with a soldering iron, crack open the sensor and replace the 470micro farad Cap. For just pennies you can repair it yourself. These caps will dry out over the years, and I fixed mine like this." Which is what I did, 1.61 for the capacitor at Radio Shack, it was longer than the original and I just drilled a hole in the case and let the end of the capacitor stick out. For those that are interested, The sensors generate a signal which has to be received by the main controller circuit board in the unit. This is why you cannot simply wire around them,

[Y'all Gibbons]

Good job and nice video. I've found that capacitors are a problem area in a lot of gadgets. My car died once and the mechanical traced it to the computer. Before buying $$$$ another one, I pulled it open and could smell a burned cap and then saw one that was leading. Replaced it for 15-cents. Turns out (digging online) that those caps were known to the car maker that they were failing after 3-5 years. (One of the few times I actually fixed something, my wife says. LOL!)

[The Daring Dufas]

Good thing you were able to repair an expensive vehicle computer. There are companies that rebuild the evil things and sell them to you with you trading in your broken one. I replace capacitors all the time in AC units after a thunder storm comes through the area. One of my customers with a pizza place had two Viewsonic monitors fail and it turned out to be an electrolytic capacitor in the power supply that was failing in many of that model. I replaced them with the same capacitance value but with capacitors that had a higher voltage and temperature rating. The monitors are in the kitchen where they are exposed to higher temperatures than what would be in an office setting. I imagine you would replace the capacitor in your vehicle computer with at least one with a higher temperature rating because it gets hot in a vehicle. ^_^

TDD