Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors
Transcript of Podcast
Welcome to door cast
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (00:05):
Season one, episode one, we’re here. We’ve had some planning, We’re launching, and
We got a sponsor. Thank you, genie. Really appreciate you for making this happen.
My name is Ryan. I’m your host. I’m going to be walking you through all things,
garage, doors and openers. This podcast is specifically designed to educate
consumers on how to choose the right company and products for your garage door opener. Now you may think
how could this possibly be exciting? I love it. And there’s thousands of hours that I
can talk about it. So sit back and enjoy. Cause we’re going to get started talking
right now.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (00:53):
All right guys, Ryan here with a door cast and I want to break down what to expect in season one.
Since Genie has decided to be our podcast sponsor, we thought it would be best to talk about garage door openers. So we’re going to
talk a little bit about some of the different types of openers. And then we’re going to
tell you a little bit about season one and what we’re going to be covering. Garage
door openers have come a long way, and a lot of times we get in conversations with
consumers about garage doors, uh, garage door openers, and what’s important to
them. And we ask them that question. It’s almost always, we want it to go up and
down. Well, of course you do. That’s everybody’s desire. And I think there’s so
much more to be considered.which is why that is what we are going to be discussing today.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (01:41):
So I’m going to talk not about any particular brand today for the most part, but
we’re going to talk about openers in general. I’d like to start out with some
of the cool technology and evolution that’s taken place recently that you may or
may not know about. So first of all, I want to talk about wifi. A lot of openers now
have a built in wifi component. this means that you can actually control the opener
from your phone or device. Here’s an example, Let’s say you’re at the grocery store. Your friend
comes over and you’re running late and you don’t want them to sit in the driveway.
So you can open up the app and open the door from the grocery store. This is
particularly great because you can also get push notifications if the door opens or
closes. I always say, for example, it’s great.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (02:26):
If you have a daughter who’s trying to sneak out of the house and she wants to go
out the garage because she wants to take the car, whatever you get the push
notification in the garage doors open, you know, your daughter’s home alone. You
definitely need to make a phone call, right? The wifi application, most of the
applications for the different manufacturers are very similar, but they all function the same, making sure your garage door opens and closes when you want it to. They all get push notifications and some even have the ability to
add other users very easily. Let’s talk about quiet because, beyond wifi and,
home automation, quietness seems to be one of the major requests that we hear
from consumers.
(And we talk about quiet garage door openers.) We always in
Intro Into The Latest Garage Door Openers (Completed 02/07/21)
most parts as dealers think about either direct drive or belt drive, but nonetheless,
you don’t have to have a loud garage door opener anymore.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (03:21):
I think it’s a thing of the past. I think most manufacturers are starting to build
openers that are significantly quieter than they used to as quietness has become
one of the main things people are looking for. So that’s been taken into
consideration belt drive and direct drive are significantly quieter than chain or
screwdriver, but not all belt drives or direct drives are built the same. So you
definitely want to make sure that you research those and figure out what you’re
looking for. Now, let me tell you a little bit about belt drives and direct drives and
what the differences are. So most of you probably have a trolley opener. And what I
mean by a trolley opener is that there’s a rail and there’s a trolley and it
runs up and down the rail as it’s opening and closing the door. So if you hear me
reference trolley openers, you know, that’s what I’m talking about.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (04:07):
That’s typically what most people have in their home. If I’m talking about direct
drive or side Mount, then you know, I’m talking about a motor, that’s either a direct
drive trolley or a side Mount opener. That’s actually using components of the door
to raise and lower it. I’m going to deep dive into that in another episode, Hey
guys, I wanna make sure that I introduce you to a company called genie. Genie is
absolutely amazing. As a matter of fact, I honestly wasn’t a genie fan until I met
them at expo and had an opportunity to really look at their product. I was blown
away. They absolutely changed everything for me. They are building game-
changing openers right now, and I definitely recommend you check them out. As a
matter of fact, I went from selling a hundred percent of one brand to now my
installers don’t want to touch them.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (05:01):
They’re selling genies and they love them. Our customers love them and you will
too! to buy them genie, go to Genie company.com and click the button where
to buy, to locate a dealer near you. let’s talk a little bit about one of the major
transformations that’s happening right now in our industry. When it comes to
openers there is a comparison between horsepower and lifting power. for a long
time, horsepower’s kind of been the way that we as dealers and the manufacturers,
have given a scale of how powerful the opener is. Now. I will say, I do
believe that horsepower is a bunch of junk when it comes to openers. And I think
that’s probably a main reason why a lot of opener companies are starting to get
away from that. They’re starting to push more towards lifting power, which I think is
a more relevant, and just a better overall way to measure the power of an opener.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (05:59):
And one of the main reasons why I think that shift has taken place is because one, a lot of openers are starting to go to DC power instead of AC with DC motors. The reason being because you can’t really measure them. There’s no conversion to horsepower. So they’ve created lifting power. a DC motor has a lot of advantages over an AC motor. Almost all DC motors are going to have, what’s called a soft start, soft, close feature. This Intro Into The Latest Garage Door Openers (Completed 02/07/21)
This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2021 – view latest version here
actually participates in helping make the opener a lot quieter and prevents it from
that lunging that sometimes you get a with an AC motor, a DC motor just typically
runs a little bit smoother where an AC motor may be a little bit more powerful. So
you got to choose on which one’s more valuable, but I will tell you that majority of
openers these days are being pushed towards the DC side.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (06:50):
Now, when talking about horsepower, I get a lot of people asking me,
What size horsepower should I get from my door? And I must say that I think a lot of
energy is put into this and it’s not really necessary. I’ll answer that with explaining how half horsepower will lift the majority of doors very easily and last you a very long time. A lot,
the companies are selling three quarter horsepower, one horsepower, or one and a quarter horsepower. And honestly, personally, I think it’s a gimmick. Maybe I can get the genie guys on here to explain more and talk a little bit more about the details on that. But for me, I’m a marketing guy and I definitely see the marketing guys behind the whole horsepower thing. So the reason why I say that, it’s probably okay. Not as important as a lot of people may think is that the opener doesn’t really lift the door anyway.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (07:50):
I mean, it’s not lifting any weight. What’s lifting the door is torsion Springs or
extension Springs, or your counterbalance system because without it, the openers
not strong enough to lift the door. So the Springs are doing all the heavy lifting. As a
matter of fact, door opener and most cases are only built to lift about five pounds of
pressure. So if your Springs are bouncing the door properly and you have the right
Springs on the door, you shouldn’t have a problem with horsepower or lifting power
for the majority of the garage door openers out there. Now let’s say, if you have a very
large, steel door insulated urethane, it’s 18 or 20 foot long, nine or 10 foot
tall, just a ginormous door, or you have a, like a two or three inch custom wood
heavy door. You might want to take a look at something other than a half Horsepower.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (08:51):
But for most doors, I would say 95% of the garage doors out there, a half horsepower is going to be more than sufficient to lift whatever door you have. Let’s discuss residential brands. These are all residential garage doors that you need to know about. Of course,
Genie company is a sponsor of ours. I know the CEO and what a wonderful person He is, and what a great team they’ve got.
They’re all about company culture, building a great product. they support us dealers really well, very nicely, And have great communication.I have to admitI, I had a very bad, misunderstanding of genie.
When I first started in the industry. When I first started installing doors, I install a lot of liftmaster. That was what the person who trained me installed. So that’s what I naturally installed and being out in the field a lot.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (09:49):
And, I was always constantly fixing genies. So I felt like genie’s. Weren’t good. When in reality, I think my view was a little bit kind of twisted. So I just want to Intro Into The Latest Garage Door Openers (Completed 02/07/21)
This transcript was exported on Feb 07, 2021 – view the latest version here to share some of my experience and I’ve already promised Genie that I’m not going to be one-sided here and give them all the positive press. We’re going to talk about
the good, bad and ugly, but I got to tell my story and I want you guys to understand
where I’m coming from. I sold Liftmasters and Liftmasters only. Well, I had a bad
taste in my mouth with Genie for a little while, just because I kept repairing their
openers all the time. There’s a different way to look at it. And I really didn’t see it
until I spent some time with the CEO at the expo. When I walked over there, he was
so kind and polite, he showed me around the booth, knew the names of all of his
employees, which there were a couple dozen, he was very personable, each one of them did, he knew about each one of them.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (10:51):
And really just impressed me with his knowledge of his team and his culture and his approach to me. And I told him, point blank. I said, Hey, I’m open to hearing everything. I got to say i’m just not having a great experience, because I see a lot of genie’s out and I’m constantly fixing them. And so he said, rightfully so. Uh, he’s made some changes over the years. And one of those changes was to bring manufacturing back to the US not only that they put their motors through like rigorous testing, which I think is pretty standard for most of these manufacturers where they’ll run them on doors up and down constantly until they break. And then they start re-evaluating parts that are breaking. I don’t think that’s just genie. I do believe they have a commitment to excellence based on my conversation with them.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (11:40):
And the reason why I was fixing a lot of Genie’s is because, a lot of the
openers that I was fixing were like builder grade openers, right? I mean, they were
installed in new homes. I personally don’t sell builder grade openers. So I think if
you buy cheap from any manufacturer, you’re definitely gonna have problems with
cheap openers. And I think every manufacturer builds like a builder grade and then
a mid grade and then a high grade opener or openers in each category. So there’s
just a lot of builder, grade, Genie openers out there. when it boils down to it,
Parts on these Genie openers are very inexpensive and for all openers for that
matter of fact. unless you’re talking about a circuit board or the motor itself, all
the other little components that typically go wrong outside of those two are fairly
Inexpensive.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (12:32):
They were easy to fix and, um, relatively affordable. So that’s my experience with genie. I’ve gone through LiftMasters for years and really enjoyed their product. I think they have some great innovation in some of their higher end products, which is really what we focus on selling. one of my favorite openers is the with led and, the wled just has like really bright built in led lights, DC, motor backup battery, a bunch of really cool features, and motion sensor, I can go on and on. We’ll talk more about that later, but, LiftMaster is also known as Chamberlain in some of the box stores. So they rebrand themselves and do more of like a blue them where LiftMaster is more of like a red theme. So, you can buy Genie and liftmasters in box stores, or from dealers. There is a difference between the dealer bought in the store bought, and we’ll cover some of that in another episode, but these are the two biggest brands in our market.
You’ll also find names like Sommer, Marin tech and both third grade openers.
As a matter of fact, those were both German, manufactured or, German garage door openers. I believe some of them are manufactured here in the U S but, I also sell SOMMER. I do not sell Marintec and, not because I don’t want to, it’s just, I don’t want to have so many options that it makes it confusing. So personally we sell Genie LiftMaster and Sommers. We keep all three in stock. we really just stock kind of the best of each one. So when you talk about types of openers, you gotta know there’s a screw drive, a belt drive chain drive and direct drive. While you’re doing your research, you want to definitely check those out. The two that I like the most are the belt drive and the direct drive.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (14:23):
And the reason why I like those are one, they’re quieter, and two tend to be more reliable. That’s pretty much the rundown of what I think you need to know as a good foundation before you start listening to other episodes, garage door openers have come so far. I love some of the features of LiftMaster. One of my favorite features is their motion sensor on a wall button, the panel is what we call it. Any movement in the garage, turns the lights on automatically. And I would say one of the biggest growing trends that I didn’t mention earlier was the side Mount. we’re going to get into that. I’m going to talk a lot about side mounts, because I do believe that everything probably just needs to shift that direction. We’re going to talk a little bit about why that it’s, easier on the door, less stress on the section itself, the garage door section.
Ryan w/ Aaron Overhead Doors (15:17):
So you have less damage and issues and you have a longer lasting opener because they just have less parts. Side Mount openers are definitely the way to go. If you have the side room, you can put an outlet over there. That’s probably the biggest headache. I think with side mounts is a lot of people don’t want to put the outlet over there. And in some cases we have to run exterior, low voltage wiring for the safety sensors and wall control. So there’s definitely some negatives, but we’re going to get all into that. This is season one, episode one, So I want you guys to stand by and pay attention next week. We’re going to be covering the best garage door openers themselves. We talked a little bit about brands and some of the best brands, but next week, we’re going to cover some of the best openers. Which openers should you buy? What features are you into?
Those are all things we’re going to discuss. We hope you have a great week. Thank you for listening.
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