The Triumph of Planned Obsolescence

Last week we were getting ready to leave the house, and the garage door opener wouldn't work. This has happened before, and turned out to be a broken spring that time, but we could tell all the springs were intact this time. So, we tried running it again, paying closer attention to the actual opener, and found that while the motor was running and the chain was hooked in properly, the chain was not moving. A few days later when we had the time, we opened the opener up and had my dad take a look at it, thinking that it was just a gear not catching...


And by 'not catching', of course, we mean 'made of nylon and shredded to bits where it rubs against the metal gear'. There is no way to fix this gear, and replacing it would be exceptionally awkward - assuming we could find or fabricate the right gear to begin with.

The next step, then, was to look up the model and see what sort of warranty it might have had on it. As it turns out, this model is no longer made, so no one would have been able to do anything for us even if the warranty still applied, but here's the kicker - the opener originally came with a ten-year warranty....

Ten years exactly. On the one hand, I am incredibly pissed off because we have had rain every day but one since this happened . On the other hand, somewhere out there is an engineer/industrial designer who really knows their estimated material lives.

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