SALT LAKE - It just kept going and going and going and going.

Recent in-house testing done by Martin Door on various garage door openers, continue to speak volumes about the durability and longevity of the Martin Garage Door and its openers.

One opener, used on an 8 x 7 test door, finally died in early July after it had posted 326,555 cycles. That test number is so far beyond any other number posted by competitors' openers tested at Martin Door in similar circumstances, that it is hard to range them in the same ballpark. While the opener finally failed, the door has not and is ready to be used in yet another test case.

A cycle consists of a garage door being raised and then closed. Using 7.5 cycles per day as an average for a homeowner, the Martin opener would have posted a life cycle of 119 years.

If 15,000 cycles for an opener is the industry average, that would mean its' average life would be five-and-a-half years.

"In general, we have had other brands of openers test as little as a few thousand cycles and we had one range over 50,000 cycles. But no one has ever come close to this," Vice President Larry Martin said of the test results.

The durability of the Martin Door is reflected in the lifetime warranty offered on all models but one. That same confidence is shown in the warranty of the garage door openers, both the DC 2500e and the DC 3700e. The DC 2500e has a 15-year warranty while the DC 3700e has a lifetime warranty.

Scott Wall, Martin Door's opener specialist, stands in front of an 8 x 7 Martin Garage Door that ran for almost 21 months before the opener failed. In all, the opener posted 326,555 cycles.