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High chances are that your automatic garage door is the largest moving mechanical part of your home & it’s used thousands of times each year across all seasons and conditions. Though any machine with mechanical moving parts is prone to repairs at one point or another, here are 10 useful DIY Tips for taking preventive measures & maintenance of your automatic garage door that can last you through decades.

Sights & Sounds

The best preventive measure you can take to ensure the long life of your garage door is to regularly observe your garage door in motion from the outside and the inside. Listen to the sounds it makes when it’s running smoothly. This will help you to immediately detect if the motor or other parts are about to go bad rather than waiting for them to go bad. As a machine with a large moving part & several other smaller moving parts it will always let you know audibly when something is amiss. Look for things like grinding or scraping noises which are indicators of mechanical failure, inspect both sides of the system for symmetrical differences in the pulleys, cables & springs.

Keep the Hardware Fastened

Your garage door slides up & down several thousand times a year, this amount of movement creates vibration which in time can loosen the bolts & roller brackets. This can easily be fixed by tightening the bolts with a socket wrench.

Garage Door Balance Testing

When your garage door is not properly balanced, the garage door opening mechanism is strained and has to work harder to slide the door open. This added strain can dramatically decrease the life of your garage door & the mechanical components.

Testing the garage door balance is simple but the actual balancing is best recommended to be left to the professionals for safety reasons.

To test the balance of your garage door simply disconnect the opener by pulling the release handle which is most commonly a red cord, then manually lift the garage door halfway up. If the door stays up it can be safely concluded that your garage door is properly balanced, however if the door falls and does not support itself then it’s time to call in a pro.

As the saying goes better sooner than later, this tip will help you diagnose a mechanical failure very early on helping to avoid a bigger repair cost & avoid any incidents. For diagnostics & estimates you can Contact Us.

Inspecting & Replacing Rollers

Roller brackets that are not directly attached to the cable system are known as CRIs or Consumer Replaceable Items. This means that specific set of rollers will be available in major home improvement outlets & are safe for consumers to install themselves, provided that you do not have a higher-end custom door, such as wood.

Cracked, chipped or even worn rollers should immediately be replaced as they pose a great safety risk to you & your family.

As a routine, roller brackets should be replaced every 7 years or so, more so if your garage door is used several times a day & should be inspected at least 2 times a year.

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