Chain, belt or jackshaft, horsepower, the battery backup California requires, and the safety features that are not optional.
Codes are amended locally. Where a city adopts an amendment that changes the answer, the section below says so — and the permit counter, not this page, is the final word.
Health and Safety Code §19891 and §19892, added by SB 969, require residential garage door openers sold, installed or offered for sale in California from 1 July 2019 to include a battery backup that operates the opener during an electrical outage, with a $1,000 civil penalty for non-compliance. In a state with Public Safety Power Shutoffs this is the rare mandate that homeowners are glad of. Anything sold to you in California without it is a problem.
Chain drive is the cheapest and the loudest, and it is fine over a garage with nothing above it. Belt drive is the default for an attached garage with a bedroom over it. Screw drive is largely legacy. Wall-mount jackshaft units bolt beside the door, free the ceiling entirely, and are the answer for a low-headroom opening — including after a soft-story retrofit — or for a heavy full-view aluminum door.
Ratings are quoted in horsepower or in equivalent newtons and they are not comparable across brands. What matters is the door: a standard insulated 16x7 steel door is comfortable on a mid-range DC unit, while a full-view aluminum, a solid wood, or an oversized door needs the top of the range. A correctly balanced door reduces the demand more than any horsepower upgrade does.
Photo eyes near the floor, required on residential openers manufactured for sale from 1 January 1993 under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 1990 and UL 325. Automatic reversal on contact. A rolling code so the remote signal cannot be captured and replayed. If you are being offered a unit without these, you are being offered something that should not be sold.
The alert when the door has been left open and the scheduled auto-close are the features households actually keep using. Camera integrations and in-garage delivery are genuinely useful to some people and ignored by most. Check the Wi-Fi signal at ceiling height before you pay for any of it.
In the desert and the Central Valley, favor a DC unit and, if the layout allows, a wall-mount that keeps the electronics out of the hottest air in the garage, and put a surge protector on the circuit. On the coast, corrosion is the enemy of the hardware more than of the opener. In wildfire country, the door's perimeter seal matters more than anything on the opener.
The door must be balanced before the opener is connected, the travel limits and force settings must be set correctly, and the safety reversal must be tested at the end of the job. An opener installed on an unbalanced door will fail early no matter what you paid for it.
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