Advice: High lift garage door with Lift
 

Hi All,

I wanted to know what I should expect if I do a high lift garage door kit. I have a 4 post lift in my garage. The ceiling height from the floor is 9'9". I currently have 24 inch between the top of the door open to the ceiling. I am guess with a new 3800 opener I could lift it 20 inches or so. I have called a few garage door companies to provide a quote but they dont seem to have done this before, so I am a little worried. Here in Miami our doors are Hurricane rated so we have a 6" brace on the inside portion of the door limiting the inside head with door open.

So if you have a similar setup, how close were you able to lift your door.

If these companies are not able to provide a quote or do the job I might just do it myself.

Thanks for any feedback

I've had a couple of these done and both were by regular garage door companies. I'm not sure about the issues with the hurricane door bracing. I would keep checking around with various companies and I think eventually someone will step up to the job. Other than if you decide to go with a side mount operator (which with a 9'9" ceiling is just about mandatory) there really isn't much special about the set up. On some garages with 12 or more ft of ceiling height they sometimes install an additional door panel on top as an adaptive measure. This wasn't necessary on either of mine which were only 10 ft and 10' 6" high. Generally the outside of the door has to be free of handles and grips becauce the door track doesn't angle back as far at the top of the door opening and the door goes more straight up past the head instead of falling back to the inside as it rises up.

I think the main problem is the 9'9" ceiling height which will get the car up for work underneath but is pretty marginal if you intend to park one car over another. At best the door and track are still going to hang a few inches down from the ceiling. I hope you're garage is fairly deep. The 10 ft ceiling I had was about as low as I could get by with and I parked a 66 Corvette over a 67 GTX with it.

I think you're assumption of raising the door from 24" clearance to 4" clearance is reasonable. Neither of the installations I had done raised the door the maximum amount. On the earlier 10 ft ceiling I actually went back and raised the track myself about 1' to 1'1/2 inches at the door. I slid the track up at the door to where the bottom roller was just even with the bottom of the track since any track extending below the roller doesn't do anything anyway. At the back of the track it was pretty simple to loosen the bolts and raise the track up 3 or 4 more inches. The OH track ended up with a slope but that didn't hurt anything. So I would stress to the installer that you need the OH track and the door sucked up absolutely as close to the ceiling as possible and then try to be there when they do the work to make sure.

Good luck.

Have you thought about a coiling roll-up door? If it will fit above your door header when coiled up, you would still have all of your ceiling space without tracks or the sectional door overhead.

In Miami, check these guys. I have used them on the west coast for years in the construction industry. I wanted to go that route, but only have about 10" of header clearance above the door....

Where to buy Overhead Garage Doors | Find A Distributor

Some city codes will not allow a rollup door to be used in a residential area. I was going to do that very thing until the city of Fort Worth said no way.

So I am going with carriage doors instead of overhead doors.

A very simple solution. All you need is to extend the vertical track "X" amount of inches of the existing track. Put the 3800 at the top which is connected to the torsion bar and springs and all set. You do not need another panel. There is a physical stop cable tensioner and electronic stop position censor.

I just had this done to my garage, with a conversion to a Liftmaster Jackshaft opener. I have about 57-63 inches of clearance underneath depending on which stop the lift is set on, with the ceiling height being 122". The max clearance I have on the door is 115", so 7" from the ceiling, and I have hurricane beams on the door. The previous clearance was around 95", so I gained about 20". The opener conversion/door lift cost about $800.