Garage Door Safety and Maintenance Tips
Garage doors are some of the many objects in your house that you don’t want to mess with! More than 15,000 injuries are treated every year due to garage door incidents. However, you can keep the maintenance of your garage door in check if you follow the following garage door repair tips that can help you avoid, not necessarily every injury but possibly the most common ones:
LEAVE NO SCREWS UNSCREWED
One of the most common injury reasons from the garage doors is the loosening of screws, bolts or nuts that result in the poor operation of your garage door. You might experience vibration in the garage door with the passage of the time. This will cause additional shaking and the bolts will go lose further. Constant lubrication and tightening of the bolts will be able to minimize the vibration as well as mitigate the risk of the garage door components coming off!
TESTING BALANCE
One of the most important of garage door safety tips is to check the balance of your garage doors. The balance of the garage door is due to the rollers and the springs that are attached to it. If the balance of the door is off, the opener of the garage door opener will need to work harder to open the door; hence, it will wear out in no time and then you’ll be having another problem added.
To ensure that the garage door balance is in good shape, you’ll need to manually lift the garage door by disengaging the cords attached to the opener, leaving in in midway and checking if it stays there or not. This is one of the most common garage door opener maintenance tips and you’ll need to replace the springs in order to set the balance of the door into its position.
REPLACE WEATHER STRIPPING
It is best to replace the components when they start wearing out instead of waiting for any problem to arise after they have completely worn out. One of the many garage door weather seal tips is that you should know is that it’s better to replace the weather seal strip at the bottom of the garage door if it becomes brittle or cracked. It helps to keep the weather out of the garage door, by sealing the bottom and letting no air or dust pass.
GARAGE DOOR OPENER INSTALLATION TIPS
If you are thinking of DIY methods for garage door opener installation, then you should be aware of the components, tools and the techniques that you need to get a perfect finish. However, you should be aware of the components and ensure that you really need garage door opener installed or not. Sometimes, it’s the roller or the garage door springs that create the problem in the garage door opening.
As mentioned in many of the garage door opener troubleshooting tips and manuals, you’ll need to evaluate the rollers, springs, the balance of the garage door and other related elements that can create an issue in the opening of the door. Once you’ve done with the inspection, you’ll be dealing with the opener installation. Use a ladder, a heavy duty angle iron for the garage door opener, which can reduce vibrations. Make sure that you replace all the components for a perfect finesse.
CABLE CHECKING
In case you are going for DIY garage door maintenance, you can also choose to fix the cables. However, it is highly not recommended that you fix the cables by yourself as it is built to lift the cables and can maim easily. You can only look at the condition of the garage door, which will help you judge if the cables have worn out or not. In case they have worn out, you can call a professional garage door cable repairer or just a traditional garage door repair company that will do the job for you!
LUBRICATE FREQUENTLY
It is not necessarily important that you should lubricate your garage door frequently! However, the moving parts of the garage door particularly the springs, rollers, the opener should be lubricated once in a week. The reason is that lubrication of the parts will reduce the friction between the components and reduce the risk of wearing off. This will add to the lifetime of your garage door as well as the components. You can easily lubricate the parts using lithium grease or a spray lubricant that is available from any garage door repair company in the area.
CHECK AUTO REVERSING
Another most common garage door maintenance tip includes the testing of the garage door auto reversing safety feature. Auto-reversing is related with the reversing of the garage door if any object enters its path when it is closing. One can easily test this by placing a brick, as mentioned in garage door safety tip manual, under the garage door and letting it shut down. On touching, the garage door should reflect back. If it does, its good to go, if not, you need to get the auto-reversing feature fixed!