Never, never, never again will I buy a Genie.
For a while they had something called Trac Drive, where the door was pulled open or pushed closed by a tough plastic strip that was spooled in and out of a coiled housing inside the opener. The track itself was aluminum, but the strip pushing the door was plastic, and the housing shell that it wound into and out of was plastic.
One month after the warranty expired, the housing burst open inside the opener while it was running, spewing the plastic strip all over the inside of the opener and destroying it.
I called a local garage door serviceman, and explained the problem over the phone. He told me this: "Well, I'm a Genie licensed dealer, and I don't want to lose my franchise. So there's a lot of things I can't really say to you. For instance, I can't tell you that the Trac Drive is a really unreliable design. And I can't tell you they all do that eventually. And I can't tell you that you were lucky it worked as long as it did. I can't tell you any of those things." I thanked him for the information, went out and bought a Chamberlain opener to replace the Genie.
I wrote a nastygram to Genie about it, quoting the glurge promise of the owners manual about "Many years of reliable service" and alluding to what the serviceman had said (or not said) about the actual quality, carefully not referring to him by name. I didn't expect an answer, and they didn't actually send a reply, but some weeks later a new opener (screw drive design) just showed up on my doorstep by UPS. No note, or anything. That was nice of them, but I still don't trust their quality after that experience, and I had already installed the Chamberlain by that time, so I sold the replacement Genie.
Since then I have always bought Chamberlain (or Craftsman, which Chamberlain makes for Sears), and I have never had a lick of trouble with them.
