If you’ve just got your new garage built, chances are that you had difficult time deciding which was the right garage door opener for your situation. Others may say that an opener is just an opener, and as long as it does its job, which is to open and to shut the garage door, it cannot be wrong. However, going deeper in details, you’ll see how many types of garage door openers are there, thus making your choice difficult.

First of all, there are many brands. My father has a Stanley garage door opener operated by remote, and he is satisfied with it. In my opinion, Stanley or not Stanley, Genie or Liftmaster, or Chamberlain, a garage opener needs to have certain qualities and features as a remote control, a service team ready to install it and to help me with troubleshooting in maintenance and operation, plus an affordable price and an extended guarantee. Is Stanley offering all these? Probably they do, but I think others may do it as well. You definitely need to do some research prior to buying anything.

Garage Door Openers Types

There are three different types of door openers:

1. chain driven opener
2. belt driven
3. screw drive openers

Each of them fits a different purpose, and they are chosen depending on the door’s weight or size. A chain driven garage door opener is appropriate for heavy doors, like the wooden garage doors, which are massive, solid, and usually weigh quite a lot more that other doors made of composite materials or aluminum. So, wooden doors are a match here. Chain drives are driven by a powerful motor, which gives them resistance to bad weather conditions, but which makes them a bit noisy.

Screw drive openers come as the most common option for usual garage doors. They typically work buy having a lifting mechanism that moves along a threaded steel rod. These are quite powerful and come in variety of different horse power motors.

Last but not least, the belt driven model of garage door opener has the great quality of being extremely silent. If your garage is neighboring a bedroom, you may want to choose it for your door. The belts do have a tendency to wear out a little fast then the other types of models. Belt driven openers typically don’t have the power that the others have either.

These are the basics when choosing a garage door opener that will suit the needs of your garage.

For more info, you can check out Tyler Casselman’s site Garage Door Openers Guide