Garages are supposed to prevent trouble by not only keeping your car safe, but also ensuring that intruders don’t use it as a point of entry into your home. However, garage doors often have problems like getting jammed, refusing to lock, and so on.
Here are a few tips that keep your garage door running smoothly all year long:
There is no power
If the power to your garage is out with the door shut and you have to get your car, this is what you do:
- Find the cord (usually with a red handle) dangling down from the guide track that the opener uses to open and close the door.
- It is the manual override, so once you pull it, you can open and close the door with your own strength in the form a little elbow grease.
Frozen garage door
Cold weather has stiffened the mechanism of your garage door opener and caused it to lose power! Most garage door openers made in the last few years have pressure adjustments for both raising and lowering. Check and adjust these settings seasonally to keep things running smoothly.
Garage door is sagging
When your garage door starts to sag, it gets more difficult to open. Garage doors, especially older, wooden models, are susceptible to the ravages of time and gravity. Here’s what you should do:
- Square them up with the tension rods positioned on the back of the door.
- The rods are placed diagonally from top to bottom corners and can be tightened at a turnbuckle to straighten out the door– allow the door to adjust to the change by doing it bit by bit.
- If your door isn’t already equipped with tension rods, you can buy them at home centers.
Garage door won’t lock
You have parked inside where the car is safe from the elements, but it isn’t secure as the garage door won’t lock. Most garage doors have two horizontal bars that move out from the center of the door into slots along the side of the door in the door track, effectively locking the door in place. Over time, these bars can shift slightly out of position so that they are no longer correctly aligned with the locking slots. Follow these steps:
- To realign the bars, unscrew the guide brackets on the edges of the door so that they are loose enough to move.
- Reposition them so that they smoothly guide the locking bars into the locking slots.
- Lubricate the lock mechanism with machine oil.
These are quick fixes to basic problems, but serious issues mean you have to call in professionals!