Garage door opener installation in Ottawa

Protech Garage Doors fits new LiftMaster, Chamberlain and Genie openers across Ottawa from its shop at 46 Grenfell Crescent in Nepean, on doors that have never had one and on doors whose old unit has run out of parts. The phone line is open 24 hours. Call (613) 845-9950 with the door's width, whether the garage is attached or detached, and whether there is an outlet on the ceiling.

Which Ottawa houses are getting a new opener

Statistics Canada counted 407,250 occupied private dwellings in the City of Ottawa in the 2021 census. 115,070 of them were built between 1961 and 1980, another 63,195 in the 1980s and 46,095 in the 1990s, so more than half the housing stock is between twenty-five and sixty-five years old. 169,760 are single-detached houses. A 1970s garage often has no opener at all. A garage from the 1980s or 1990s is usually still running the opener the builder hung, and Chamberlain and LiftMaster stopped supplying parts for anything made before 1993, so a unit of that age that fails is replaced. The question becomes which unit goes up rather than whether.

The outlet above the door

An opener plugs in. The Canadian Electrical Code, Rule 26-724, calls for one receptacle in the garage for each cord-connected overhead door opener, within a metre of the unit, and an extension cord run to the wall outlet by the side door is not that. Older garages were wired before the rule and many have nothing on the ceiling. The City of Ottawa does not regulate electrical work and issues no building permit for it; its building permit FAQ sends the question to the Electrical Safety Authority. ESA's position is that a receptacle is installed by a Licensed Electrical Contractor, or by the homeowner personally after filing a notification of work, and by nobody else. Say on the phone whether the ceiling has an outlet. If it does not, that is the first job, it is an electrician's, and the opener goes in after it.

Power cuts, and why the battery matters in this city

Ottawa has lost its grid twice in living memory. Between 1998-01-05 and 1998-01-10 freezing rain fell for more than eighty hours over eastern Ontario, the city declared a state of emergency, and more than four million people along the storm's path were without electricity, some of them for a month. On 2022-05-21 the derecho cut power to 180,946 Hydro Ottawa customers in one afternoon, 54 per cent of the utility's customer base, and the ninety per cent mark was not reached until the evening of 2022-05-28. An opener with an integrated battery backup keeps opening the door through an outage for a limited number of cycles and recharges when the power returns. LiftMaster builds several units with the battery inside the head. California has required battery backup on every new residential opener sold there since 2019-07-01. Ontario does not, so it is a choice, and on a detached garage with no side door, where the manual release cord is on the wrong side of a locked door, it is the choice.

Setting it up for the winter it will work in

Travel limits and force are set on the day of the install, on a door at that day's temperature. Environment Canada's 1991 to 2020 normals for Ottawa's airport put January's daily mean at minus 10.0 and the coldest night of an average January at minus 26.8. The Ottawa page covers what that does to the door itself. What it does to a new opener is make a door that balanced in September read as an obstruction in January, so the door starts reversing on the floor. Chamberlain's own support page says never to use the force adjustment to compensate for a binding or sticking door. Force is set to the door, never to the season, and a January reversal is a call to service the door.

The photo-eyes get placed with the sun in mind. At Ottawa's latitude the noon sun in late December is only about 21 degrees above the horizon, low enough to come through the open door and land on a sensor on the far track. Chamberlain says sun into the receiving eye makes the door open and refuse to close, and its fix is to put the receiver on the shaded side. That decision is made on the ladder at the install, not in February.

Booking an installation in Ottawa

Call (613) 845-9950 at any hour, or email info@protechgarage.ca for a quote with no urgency behind it. Have the door's width and height, whether it is a single-skin or an insulated door (the installation page explains how weight sizes the unit), whether the ceiling has an outlet, and whether the garage is attached or detached. Ask what the lead time is on the model you want. An installation is booked around the unit; repairs are booked same day.