All garage doors have an emergency bypass. All electronic or automatic garage doors have a bypass that will allow you to open it manually. This becomes necessary when there is a power failure or, for some reason, you lose your remote. The bypass disconnects the door from the powered carriage, but it stays on the track. Once you disconnect it, you can then lift it manually. When the power comes back on or you locate your lost remote, you can lock the bypass and use the door normally again. Place a ladder under the chain that operates the garage door. Locate a red cord hanging from a bracket on the chain. These cords are almost always red, but if there is only one cord and it's not red, it's probably the right one. The cord will have a plastic red knob on the end. Most often, the cord is located close to the door. Jerk on the cord using the knob. The cord is hooked onto a small lever. The lever may be tilted at a 15-degree angle or pointing straight down. You will feel that the lever is spring-loaded;
pull the cord until the lever locks in the down position. Step down from the ladder. Grab the door with both hands and lift it. If the door will not budge, pull the cord harder until it locks open. If the door is too heavy for you to lift, don't hurt yourself. Get an assistant to help you lift it. Do not let go of the door once it's off the ground. It is free on the track and it will fall if you let go. Prop the door open using a two-by-four or have someone hold the door open for you while you drive your car in or out. When you're finished with the door, ease it down by hand. Pull down on the cord hard to lock it in place again after the power comes back on or you find your remote. Pull on the cord and watch as the bracket slips back into the chain bracket, locking the door into the powered carriage. If the door won't open, but the chain is moving, pull on the chain again until the bracket locks. Test and pull the cord again if necessary to lock it. Things You Will Need Ladder Tip Warning References Genie Door: Garage Door Troubleshooting Photo Credits Jupiterimages/Comstock/Getty Images Suggest a Correction
We’re lucky where I live. And my “where I live” I mean my specific neighborhood and my specific house. Knock on wood, we don’t have the issues with flooding that so many around me (including in my neighborhood) do. We don’t lose power. We don’t have major natural disasters. So of course we lost power for the first time since we moved into our house.If you haven’t noticed, it’s been incredibly hot this summer. And on one of our hottest days of the year, we lost power. At first, it was a flicker that went out for just a minute or so before everything turned back on. Five minutes later, the power went out, but there was no buzz of the house turning itself back on. As time ticked by, it got awfully warm in our house. Calling ComEd – our electric company in Chicago – I found out that it would be hours before they expected to repair the blown transformer and restore power.It was a no brainer. I called our library, confirmed they had power (and air conditioning), and I packed up the wee ones.
Getting out of the garage wasn’t a huge issue. I know how to disable the automatic garage door opener. In my case, you simply pull on the red lever, which removes the motor and gear from the track. Then I can manually lift it up and exit the garage – just like I did when I was a little kid and we didn’t have an automatic garage door opener.Unlike when I was a little kid, we don’t have a key to lock our garage door to keep anyone from coming in the way we did back then. Instead, I locked the back door to our house (thank goodness for the battery operated keypad lock on our front door), and manually closed the garage door. What else can I do, right?Yes, it was definitely a good call to leave my house. The power outage was fairly widespread. When there’s no power to stoplights anywhere around, you know it’s a bad sign. It took us awhile to get to the library, but we were happy to be there (and meet up with some friends who had the same idea) once we finally arrived.
After a few hours at the library, I got a text from a friend letting me know power had been restored. We all cheered and jumped back in the car to return home. When we arrived, I manually opened the garage door again and drove inside. After scooting the wee ones through the front door, I turned my attention to the garage door, knowing I wanted to reconnect it so that it would work with my opener again.It’s only easy if you remember how to do it. I pressed the garage door opener, pleased with myself for remembering how to do this, since I hadn’t had to reconnect my garage door opener in over 10 years. I waited for it to engage the gears as it went past, smiling to myself. The motor worked and pulled the gear along, but the garage door wasn’t engaged and remained firmly planted on the garage floor.I tried pulling and tugging the cord to see if that worked. Calling friends to see if they (or their husbands if they were around) knew how to reattach the garage door opener.
I could have sat down to cry. Or I could have pretended that all was well with the world and that I wanted to manually open and close the garage door for the rest of the time I lived in this house. Or I could have waited for my husband to get home and make him fix it. But that’s not how I roll. I like figuring things out and fixing them.So I stood up on the door of my car to peer at the track and gear and garage door. It isn’t a complicated system, relatively. I should be able to visually see how it goes together and fix it that way. Once I really looked at it, I figured it out, but I’ll save you the pain of having to sit and stare and puzzle.The first key is that you have to open your garage door. Trying to reengage your garage door opener with the door closed doesn’t work. Next up, is reattaching the gear to the track. When you disengage it, it’s easy and obvious. You simply pull back on the emergency cord, and it disengages. Pulling back a second time does nothing.