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My garage door opener stopped working the other day - I thought it odd that the battery should go so quickly as I don't use it much, but I tossed it aside intending to "get around to it".

As it happened, one of the women at my Oak Point poker game mentioned that her opener died this week also and asked me how to open it to replace the battery. I hadn't even looked at the thing at that point, so couldn't tell her, but the next morning I brought it to my desk to take a look. It turns out it's a "pry open" job, but it wasn't particularly easy, so I'll write this up to save someone else a little trouble.

Mine is a "Buildmark" unit; yours might be different - yours might have screws rather than being intended to be pried apart, so don't take this post as absolute. On my opener, there's a notch at one of the short ends as shown in the picture at left and a similar notch along one of the longer edges. You can see that the notch got a little chewed up by my first attempts to get it opened.

I used a small flat bladed screw driver to start prying this apart. You might be able to do it with the edge of a dime, though I didn't get very far with that idea. The notches are about thumbnail size, but I think you'd need really tough nails to pop this open.

Once I had it opened a little with the screwdriver, I did find a use for the dime: I pushed that in to hold the little space I had gained at that end, and then applied the screw driver to the other notch as shown on the right.

This clam still did not want to open, but with enough prying with the screwdriver and twisting with the dime, it finally gave up and came apart.

So that I could document the procedure with my camera, I immediately snapped it back together and tried again. To my total astonishment, it was just as hard to open the second time! Only after doing it three times has it loosened up enough that I can do it entirely wth just the dime, and it's still fairly resistant.

Success at last! There's the exposed battery, ready to pop out. At least that requires nothing more than fingernails, but unless you have short nails, you still might want to use that screwdriver even for that. My battery is a 3 Volt CR2032, probably less than a dollar almost anywhere.

When snapping this back together, notice the orientation of the cover. There's only one way it can go back together - there's stuff in the way if you have it wrong. Probably you'll leave enough toolmarks at the notch edges to make it obvious anyway, but that blue thing in the picture below needs to line up with a hole in the plastic insert in the cover.

Unfortunately, the battery isn't my problem: I'm enough of a geek to have voltmeters in more than one closet here, so I tested the battery and it is putting out a strong 3 volts. While I still had it apart I pushed at the switch itself - that's the greyish colored thing at about 7:00 o'clock in the picture at left. Often those just wear out, especially if the thing has been bouncing around in a glove compartment as mine has. If you are really geekish I suppose you could try soldering in a new one - I pulled the circuit board to see how hard that would be (I've said it before: I'm cheap!) and there's nothing that would be all that hard, but I tried shorting the terminals manually and it still didn't work. Therefore this is just completely kaput or - worse - the receiver at the motor end is dead.

Oh well - as I said, we don't use it much, so we'll probably just live without it..

For those who don't want to struggle, here's another way to do it: take it to a Radio Shack store, hand it to the clerk, and say you need a new battery. They'll almost always open it and replace the battery for you. Not bad for a dollar or so..

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