Electrical – Garage has switched outlets only, cannot operate new garage doors. What are the options

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UPDATE: For anyone curious about what I ended up doing — I bought 6 motion sensor plugs, plugged those into the existing outlets, then plugged the lights into that, and the garage door opener plug went into the existing outlet. Now everything works just fine, and I can walk in and out of the garage and the lights automatically turn on with motion, and the garage doors always have power. I bought these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0106IYO2K/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

So I just spent about a month re-doing a 36 year old garage garage from top to bottom in preparation for new garage doors being installed. The previous garage doors were manually operated when I bought the house 4 years ago, however, they did have an old broken garage door opener installed on one of the doors.

I re-did the walls, some of the ceiling, some electrical, patched holes, removed cabinets, sealed every nook and cranny, and re-did the entire floor. The day the garage doors were installed (after everything had already been re-done and painted), I realized the outlets where the openers were to be installed were switched only, and not half hot (it actually didn't even cross my mind until we installed them).

So now my new openers do not work unless the garage lights are on. I'm now looking for any possible alternatives to not have to open up the wall, run wires, etc. as it will be a complete mess.

The garage has 6 outlets on the ceiling, 3 per side. The outlets are on a two way switch, so you can turn the lights on and off in the garage from either the entrance, or the back of the garage.

Neither of the two boxes where the garage opener plugs into has a constant hot.

  • I've already thought about leaving the switch on 24/7, and buying 6 motion adapters to plug the lights into, but IMO it's expensive long-term as it's possible they'll eventually fail, have issues with turning the lights on, issues with lights going on in the middle of the night from bugs, etc.

So, what are my options?

The switches on the wall control the ceiling outlets.

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Best Answer

One option, would be to install a new electrical circuit in the panel, and run it up to the ceiling in surface mounted conduit.