A garage door is the most frequently used part of the entire home. With a lot of working parts that vary from heavy to light, the garage door can wear down over time. Each component of the garage door plays a major role in overall function. If one part is not performing according to its capacity then the rest will begin to follow suit. Making personal care and maintenance the utmost importance, helps prevent garage doors maintenance and repairs. Read in detail. There are some maintenance tips which you can do yourself –
1.Use Your Eyes And Ears – The first thing you should do before you try to do anything else is just to look and listen. Operate the garage door and watch when it moves up and down. Listen to sounds that it is making, as its parts begin to work together. Is it making a noise that you could not recognise? Are parts like the pulleys , cables and springs working efficiently or are the parts shaky and seems to break?
- Fasten Up The Hardware – Garage doors are used throughout the busy life. Moving up and down all the time may cause some of the fastening parts of garage doors like bolts and hardware to loosen with time. This does not mean that your garage door is defected, loosened hardware may happen with time. If one of the bolts is getting loose then the entire garage door alignment and function can be thrown off. You have to grab your toolset and disconnect the power to the garage door opener. Grab the correct wrench and double check each Bolt to ensure that they are fastened. This way you will avoid significant damage to the garage door, eliminate possible phone calls to get garage door repairs and maintenance.
- Check The Balance Of Your Garage Door – When the garage door is not balanced, the garage door opener will not run smoothly. When it moves up and down it needs to work harder than it should have to. This may cause the garage door opener to break down with time. Disconnect power to the garage door opener by pulling down the dangling red cord. Once this is done you have to pull the garage door up halfway manually. Once it is lifted halfway let go and see what happens. If it falls to ground slowly or fast then it is off balance. This means that the counterweight system requires some maintenance, and although the checking may be done by you but hiring a professional for repairing garage door’s spring is highly recommended.
- Lube Moving Parts – Garage doors have a lot of working parts that are made of metal. The parts rub and move against each other and metal on metal is not always smooth. If you can routinely grease and oil your garage door, you can add your years of operation to the system. It only takes 10 to 15 minutes to complete. Using white Lithium grease on the garage door openers chain or screw and spraying a light coat of lubricant on the overhead spring. Increasing efficiency and reducing rust help prevent future garage door opener maintenance.
5. Test Auto-Reverse Safety Feature – The auto reverse safety feature of the garage door has two working mechanisms-mechanical and photocell. You have to test both of these mechanisms on your own.
To test your mechanical feature, just place a piece of wood on the ground in your door track Path. When the door is coming down see that when it touches the ground it reverses direction.
To test the photocell mechanism, press the button to close the garage door. When the garage door lowers, just place your foot across the sensory beams. If the door stops and moves back up, then your photo cells are working properly.
Applying these different maintenance tasks to the garage door will help you avoid hiring a professional. But some of these tasks may have a deeper issue and in that case you must hire a garage door technician.