Door Work With a Charger Install

Two Trades, One Ceiling

An electrician’s job on a charger install is to get a circuit from the panel to a point on the wall, safely and to code. Ours is everything that circuit has to travel past.

In a typical Huntington Beach garage that means a torsion shaft running the full width of the header, a spring or two on that shaft, a centre bearing plate, end bearing plates, cable drums at each end, vertical track down both sides, horizontal track back into the garage on hanging angles, an opener rail down the centre, and a pair of low voltage wires running from the opener down to a photo eye at each side of the opening about six inches off the floor.

Nobody hands the electrician a drawing of that. So we do.

The Survey

The cheapest visit on the whole project. We come out before the electrical quote, or at least before anything is drilled, and mark on the wall and ceiling the areas that have to stay clear.

• The header strip. The shaft, springs and bearing plates live here, and a spring change needs room to swing winding bars in an arc. Conduit fixed tight across the front of the shaft means the next spring job starts by calling the electrician back to move it.
• The track and flange line. The vertical track carries the rollers and is bolted through to the jamb. Nothing gets fixed to it, and nothing sits where a roller has to pass.
• The opener rail and its ceiling angles. The rail is braced back to the framing. A run that crosses it either fouls the trolley or hangs where the door panel arrives at full open.
• The floor line, both sides. Sensor wire runs here. It is thin, it is not in conduit, and it is the single most damaged item on a charger job.
• The door swing envelope. At full open the top section sits under the ceiling further back than most people expect. We mark the back edge of it.

The electrician gets that as a set of notes and photographs. Most are glad of it, because a route chosen with the constraints known costs the same as one chosen blind and does not have to be redone.

Moving the Opener Instead of the Wire

Sometimes the good conduit route is exactly where the opener lives, and moving the opener is the cheaper answer.

A trolley opener can often be shifted a foot or two along the ceiling, which needs the rail re-braced and the travel and force limits reset afterwards. Where the ceiling is genuinely contested, between a charger run, a storage rack and a car with a tall roof box, a jackshaft opener is worth pricing. It mounts on the end of the torsion shaft at the wall beside the door and takes the entire centre of the ceiling out of the argument.

Either way, the safety reversal has to be retested afterwards. UL 325 requires both a non-contact system, the photo eyes, and a contact reversal on force, and moving an opener disturbs both. We test them before we leave and we show you the test rather than describing it.

Sensor Wiring, Handled Properly

We reroute the photo eye wiring away from the new conduit run, clip it up off the floor line, and sleeve it where it crosses anything that might get drilled or stapled. If a bracket has already been knocked, we realign the eyes and confirm the indicator lights are steady rather than flickering.

This is a small job that prevents the most common post-install call we get, which is a door that closes six inches and comes straight back up.

Afterwards

We come back once the charger is live. Full cycle test, balance test by hand at the halfway point, both reversal tests, sensor alignment, and a look at the charging lead position.

That last one matters more than it sounds. A charging cable coiled on the floor near the opening is invisible to the photo eyes, because those beams cross the opening rather than sweep the floor. A door closing on a charging lead damages the lead, the bottom seal and sometimes the bottom section. A hook on the wall solves it permanently for the price of the hook.

We do not touch the charger, the circuit or the panel at any point. Call Anytimemailer at (714) 943-8554.